Editorial: Japan's whaling friends

The small countries supporting Japan at the International Whaling Commission cling to spurious ecological arguments and post-colonial rhetoric to justify their position. Rich Western nations - including New Zealand - were supposedly guilty of colonial discrimination as they pressured small fry to sign up for the anti-whaling cause. At the same time they were guilty of hypocrisy for turning an organisation designed to manage whaling into one that effectively banned it.

Then there was the ecological argument expressed by Daven Joseph, an IWC delegate from St Kitts and Nevis: the whaling moratorium should be lifted because whales are at the top of the food chain and thus are seriously depleting valuable fish stocks.

Neither argument is tenable. The real reason that so many small nations voted against the moratorium is that they have been seduced by large amounts of Japanese cash in return for their votes. In the event, the Japanese did not get everything they wanted at the whaling body's meeting in St Kitts. They lost votes on four resolutions before winning the fifth - which declared the 1986 moratorium on whaling unnecessary - by just 33 to 32.

This is way short of the 75 per cent majority needed to overturn the moratorium, but it was still a significant victory and, as the tears of conservationists testify, a significant defeat for the anti-whaling lobby.

Japan is playing the long game and although it did not fully succeed this time, it won enough points to be satisfied that its strategy of buying votes is working. Indeed, unless something is done to turn the tide, it cannot be long before Japan is able to dominate the IWC and return to commercial whaling.

There is no question that New Zealand should or could attempt to match Japan's dollar diplomacy on this issue but it should bring some moral suasion to bear on some of its close Pacific neighbours, notably the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu, who have chosen to take the Japanese silver and vote for whaling. New Zealand and Australia are two anti-whaling countries whom they turn to in their hour of need, whether it be to restore law and order or to meet the challenge of global warming.

But, even more importantly, they should be reminded that the depletion of fish stocks around the world is not the fault of burgeoning whale populations, as some of their fellow voters would have it, but of overfishing by human beings, notably the Japanese. For, when all is said and done, it is not the whales that sit at the top of the food chain, but people.