DARIUS BARTLETT,
Sir, - The 54th annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission has just taken place in Shimonoseki, Japan. Japan is, of course, one of the few remaining countries still advocating commercial whaling and it has become ever more isolated in its stance, as the weight of worldwide public and political opinion against the whaling industry has increased.
It is a matter of great concern, therefore, to learn that Japan has asked Zimbabwe (which has no ocean!) to join the IWC. Zimbabwe is one of the few African countries seeking a continuing trade in ivory, but it is of course pure coincidence that Japan happens to be one of the world's largest remaining markets for ivory products. A number of other African countries, including Guinea, Benin, Gabon and Morocco, have also recently joined the IWC, while Cap Verde, Mauritania and Senegal are all now considering joining as well. They are all speaking strongly in favour of Japan's proposal to legalise commercial whaling, even though none of these has ever been a whaling country itself.
The main reason quoted by these countries for supporting Japan, is that whales are "eating all the fish", (which is exactly Japan's argument) and thereby depriving local people of their food! This is an entirely spurious argument: the biggest threat to fisheries in Africa, especially in the northwest, comes from EU and other foreign fishing fleets.
These are issues of direct relevance to Ireland. On the one hand, Ireland has always claimed to be a country friendly towards whales and dolphins, and underlined this by being the first country in the world to declare its territorial waters a sanctuary area for cetaceans. At the same time, however, Ireland's own super-trawler, Atlantic Dawn, continues to operate in Mauritanian coastal waters, including areas known to be traditional migration routes for significant populations of whales.
Apart from the moral and ethical questions posed by the presence of vessels such as the Atlantic Dawn, in West African waters, and the industrial-scale exploitation of diminishing fish stocks needed by the artisanal fishing communities of Mauritania and neighbouring Senegal, we also now see the decline in available catch being blamed on the whales! If Ireland truly does wish to see whales and dolphins protected, we surely have a duty to not only declare our own waters a sanctuary, but to also actively avoid actions that may threaten or endanger the survival of these species in other territorial seas? - Yours, etc.,
DARIUS BARTLETT,
Geography Department,
University College Cork.