Guest blog by Sara Holden, our International whales campaign coordinator
If you google “ Mount Difficulty” the first twenty-five pages do not link to information about the evocatively named central New Zealand mountain – they all go straight to adverts for wine and vineyards. It is apt that the analogy adopted (not by consensus) by the IWC Commissioners is that discussions on the future of the IWC are like scaling Mount Difficulty, as the very process of discussing the discussions could drive you to drink.
Today the IWC finished a day early. Suffice to say we were well short of the summit.
At the risk of flogging this analogy to death – the rope was cut on the last twelve months of debate about the future of the Commission (for that read the future of whales) and it currently lies in a crumpled heap at the bottom of a crevasse.
Greenpeace has no difficulty getting whales to the top of a mountain – check out the photo and you will see that we have done it before!
At the IWC meeting in Berlin we were trying to get government to talk about the other threats to whales – 300,000 of them accidentally caught and killed each year in nets. In fairness to the Commission this year they acknowledged another significant threat – climate change and urged governments to take action to reverse the impacts. Is this the first step towards the creation of an International WHALES Commission? It certainly should be.
The other piece of meeting jargon floating around this week has been “miniaturisation”.
This springs from an acceptance that the Small Working Group appointed to the task this time last year and made up of more than thirty countries – nearly half the membership of the Commission – wasn't small and not surprisingly didn't work.
For the next twelve months it will be replaced with a miniature version in the hope that smaller is better. A twelve country strong Working Group with another twelve months to debate. The IWC has a new chairman as well – from Chile.
Chile has mountains too. And earthquakes. I hear their mountain rescue teams are
