Save the Whales -- By Hunting Them?
In 1986, the International Whaling Commission enacted a moratorium on commercial whaling. It was meant to give IWC member nations time to gather data about worldwide whale populations, then come up with a permanent management plan.
Twenty-five years later, the “temporary ban” is still in place, but three whaling nations -- Japan, Norway, and Iceland -- keep hunting whales anyway, selling them commercially thanks to loopholes in the IWC’s framework. More than 33,500 whales have been killed for commercial harvest since the moratorium went into effect.
This week, in an effort to breathe new life into the IWC’s bogged-down process, three American scientists floated a provacative plan in the January 12, 2012, issue of Nature (“A Market Approach To Saving Whales”). They propose establishing a cap-and-trade style market in commercial whaling quotas. It's an old idea, but this time there’s a twist: conservationists could purchase quotas, too, then pocket them, in essence saving as many whales as money could buy.
“In most managed fisheries, people who want a quota to be reduced can’t just buy a share and not fish it,” says Steven Gaines, one of the co-creators of the plan. “But that seemed to be an interesting fit for this problem.” Gaines, dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote the proposal with Christopher Costello, a UCSB colleague, and Leah R. Gerber, a marine conservation biologist at Arizona State University.
Gerber has been a consulting scientist for the IWC since the late 1990s. Her past work on whale sanctuaries, and the effects of whale predation on commercial fisheries, had a hand in shaping subsequent IWC policies in those areas. This week’s proposal isn’t sponsored or sanctioned by the IWC, but Gerber has circulated the idea among the U.S. representatives to the commission.
Monica Medina, deputy undersecretary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, serves as the U.S. commissioner. When I asked for her reaction on the Nature commentary, she sent a carefully worded statement that reveals nothing about the U.S. position on the idea: "We agree with the authors that it would be best to end commercial whaling and we would like to break the deadlock over this issue at the IWC, however all previous efforts to do that have unfortunately failed. Now, countries that oppose commercial whaling, including the United States, are instead seeking to expand the Commission's work on a number of important conservation initiatives."
The full IWC is next scheduled to meet in July in Panama City, Panama.
A similar idea was floated thirty years ago by the population ecologist C.W. Clark, Gerber and her colleagues write, but “the concept was ahead of its time.” Quotas and markets had not yet been field tested in other realms of commerce, such as fisheries air pollution, and biodiversity. But individual, tradeable quotas are now a common management tool in commercial fisheries worldwide.
The scientists propose that some of the quotas would go to IWC member nations (presumably to be passed down to individual whalers), while others would be put up for auction, with conservation groups eligible to purchase them. Money from the auction would go to whale conservation. Environmental groups could also buy quotas from the member nations or individual whalers who are willing to part with them. “Whalers could profit from whales without harvesting the animals,” they write. “A market would therefore open the door to reducing mortality without need to battle over whether whaling is honourable [sic] or shameful.”
In a phone interview earlier this week, Gerber acknowledged that the idea still needs a lot of fleshing out. “We’re planning a more detailed paper this spring that considers a number of cap-and-trade scenarios,” she said.
The basis for receiving a quota could become a heated point. If Japan, Norway, and Iceland received the largest quotas, they would essentially be rewarded for breaking the IWC’s current rules. If other IWC member nations (there are 89 of them) were awarded quotas, fishermen all over the world might be tempted to become whalers.
Gerber is aware of all the questions her proposal raises. “We don’t have the answers yet,” she said. “We want to test the waters, see if the IWC community would be receptive to this type of approach. … Under this system, some whaling would occur,” though at a much-diminished level. “What’s going on now is an unsustainable harvest. The current situation is not in anybody’s best interest.”
The early reaction from conservation groups has been largely cool to the idea. “Our interest is in saving whales, not commercial whalers,” said Taryn Kiekow, a marine mammal specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “You cannot save whales by legalizing their slaughter.”
“It’s another attempt to legitimize commercial whaling,” Greenpeace senior oceans campaigner Phil Kline told me. “We find no merit in the idea. It would legitimize a whale hunt and create a market where there is no market now.” Kline acknowledged that the current moratorium isn’t perfect, but he said the temporary ban has saved “hundreds of thousands of whales” that would otherwise be killed by nations -- Korea is one example -- locked out of the hunt by the moratorium. “The current situation may be political gridlock, but it isn’t gridlock for the whales.”
Other advocates, however, were at least intrigued. “The authors have put forth some bold, fresh thinking aimed at a barbaric practice that has become an intractable problem,” said Mike Sweeney, California director of The Nature Conservancy. And Tom Lalley with the Environmental Defense Fund's oceans program said he found the proposal a “provocative and fascinating idea,” but he’s cautious about applying fisheries management techniques to whaling. “Whales are different from fish,” Lalley said.
In the end, “A Market Approach To Saving Whales” might be a solid economic idea, but it may suffer from the fact that the intractable problems at the IWC aren’t economic problems. They’re ethical and cultural. Applying fishery management theory to whales misses the point that, as Lalley points out, whales are not fish. Conservation status aside, they fall into that special category we reserve for gorillas and horses. They’re no longer acceptable as meat.
From this perspective, legalizing even the smallest commercial whaling industry risks a moral hazard. If a commercial market in whale meat and oil were morally sanctioned by a legalized hunt, consumer demand might be stoked -- indeed, it would be in the whalers’ best interest, as it would increase the price for their product. High profit then could draw poachers into the hunt. And people who have relied on whaling for generations have a cultural impetus to continue hunting whales; they might be unwilling to give up their way of life no matter what the financial incentives.
“It may be a fascinating idea in principle, but it just doesn’t seem at all workable in practice,” said Patrick Ramage, global whale program director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
Ramage offered an interesting perspective on the Nature commentary. I reached him earlier this week in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he was meeting with local conservationists who are working to end the Icelandic whale hunt. Ramage told me his organization long ago decided to break the IWC deadlock in its own way -- by abandoning hope for a breakthrough at the commission. IFAW now focuses on working at the grassroots level inside the three remaining whaling nations. Ramage is trying to convince Icelandic leaders that their whales are worth more alive than dead.
“The decision to end whaling isn’t going to be made in Washington or Cambridge, England,” where the IWC is headquartered, he said. “It’s going to be made in Tokyo, Reykjavik, and Oslo for reasons that make sense for the Japanese, Icelandic, and Norwegian people.”
