JAPAN: Japan's agriculture minister, defending his country's controversial scientific whaling programme, suggested yesterday the giant ocean mammals were taking food from the mouths of millions of starving people worldwide.
"I wonder whether you know that whales consume more than three to five times the maritime resources (that humans do), or in terms of fish, 300 million to 450 million tonnes of fish," Mr Tsutomu Takebe told a news conference. "There are 800 million human beings who are undernourished." Mr Takebe later qualified his remark, saying he was merely pointing out the necessity of exploiting natural resources on a sustainable basis, and not arguing that whales were actually to blame for global hunger.
Japan today begins a limited hunt for whales for the first time in 25 years.