KEY POINTS:
Auckland's Pacific community will stage a rally in Manukau Square tomorrow to protest against Japanese plans to hunt up to 50 humpback whales next summer.
Melino Maka, rally co-organiser and Tongan Advisory Council chairman, says the rally is not anti-Japanese but about saving one of the few economic lifelines Pacific nations have in tourism.
"Humpbacks play a major part in many of our economies, culture and traditions. What happens to us if Japanese research whaling fleets wipe out this vulnerable species?"
Mr Maka said it was vital to protest at plans to kill South Pacific humpbacks for scientific research given the whales were essential to tourism here and throughout the Pacific.
Humpbacks feed in the food-rich waters of the Antarctic and are seen around the local coasts as they journey to their mating and breeding grounds in the warm waters of Australia and the Pacific.
Mr Maka said whale watching had become a boom industry across the South Pacific in the past decade, earning US$21 million ($28.6 million) a year.
In Tonga, each humpback contributed about US$1 million to the country's economy during its lifetime.
Whale-watching industries were developing in Samoa, Niue, French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Samoa and Fiji.
"These humpback populations are small and hunting will put them in serious jeopardy. If they die, this economic lifeline for Pacific nations dies with them."
Although commercial whaling was banned in 1986, the Japanese whaling fleet have travelled to the protected waters of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary each year to hunt whales for their scientific research programme.
Mr Maka said humpback whales were taken to the brink of extinction in the South Pacific in the 1950s and 1960s.
Most of the 45,000 humpbacks taken on their Antarctic feeding grounds by the illegal whaling operations of the former Soviet Union during the 1960s were from South Pacific breeding grounds.
Mr Maka said a delegation of community leaders intended to travel to Wellington next week to present the Japanese ambassador with a diplomatic letter of protest and share their concerns about the consequences for New Zealand and Pacific tourism if Japanese whaling fleets carried out their plan to hunt humpbacks.
Mark Orams, a marine scientist, said it was of particular concern that the Japanese were adding 50 humpbacks and 50 fin whales to the kill.
Dr Orams said that in the past they had concentrated on the more abundant minke whales.
"The Japanese plan to kill 50 humpbacks has the potential to impact the recovery of the population and to reduce the potential of whale-watch operators to reliably sight humpbacks in their local waters."
Japan says it has a right to hunt whales due to their historical and cultural connections as a source of food.
"However, the whales they propose to kill in the Southern Ocean have no connection with Japan as a nation," Dr Orams said. "They are Southern Hemisphere humpbacks that spend their lives feeding in the Southern Ocean, migrating up the coasts of Southern Hemisphere nations [like Australia and New Zealand] and mating, calving and raising their young in the warmer tropical waters, like those surrounding Pacific Island nations."
Dr Orams said many Pacific peoples rightly viewed the humpbacks as their taonga that came to their nations as part of a regular, natural cycle.
* The protest rally, Safe Journey, Let the Humpback Live, tomorrow, Manukau Square, Manukau City, 12-2pm.
