IWMC World Conservation Trust

In This Issue

Editorial : Where's the balance of Nature? by Guillermo Puccio

Ukraine and Iceland Join CITES

CITES Secretariat Backs Whale, Hawskbill Turtle Downlist Effort; fears politicizing of CITES

Greenpeace steps up its pre-CITES efforts against whaling cultures

New Zealand declares "Hector's" Dolphin threatened

2nd Pan African Sustainable Use Symposium, July 2000

Glimpse of Cultural Impact of Seal Fur Ban slips into US Press

Judge rules against State Trapping Ban

General Information

The main reason for not earning peoples confidence on exploiting natural renewable resources rationally is because sustainable use countries, especially in the developed world, do not counterattack extreme NGOs by supporting national programs on public awareness. The gap between North and South is mainly dictated by the percentage of their budget allocated to environmental issues, mainly public awareness and education. 

Nevertheless, it seems that there are new patterns in the North that Southern countries are not experiencing. Something strange happening in the world's richest countries. People are not reproducing. It is not that they are tired of life. Quite the contrary: most Europeans and Japanese seem determined to revel in the simpler pleasures it provides - sex, sport, holidays and ecotourism in hot or cold places and watching TV series on declining wildlife - until they are well into their nineties. They refuse to breed. There is nothing contradictory about this. In theory, children can be nice, but they are often noisy, sometimes get dirty and always need years of schooling parents have to pay for, which means they tend to be far more expensive than puppies, goldfish or a month in Brazil's tropical beaches. They also require a lot of personal attention which, as everybody knows, means taking precious time off from living. 

Confronted by this truth, the rich have decided that kids are not for them. In every country, wealthy, highly educated people have far fewer children than the poor and semi-literate. This seems to be a law of nature, and a peculiar one it is because in a rational universe the reverse would be the rule. But there it is, the notion that breeding "like rabbits" is for proletarians and rural people, who presumably do not care what happens to their offspring, not for decent citizens, has long been a middle-class argument of fait. 

If you want to find numerous-size families you have to visit Africa, South Asia or Latin America. In Western Europe, children of native stock are becoming increasingly rare. The consequences of the widespread conviction that there is no space for youngsters in a responsible modern household will surely be dramatic. According to the latest projections of the UN, from a unit that delights to unload statistical bombs, between now and 2050, there will be sixteen million fewer Italians and nine million fewer Spaniards, with Germany down by nine million as well. 

Argentina is backward in this respect: UN says it will have 54,5 million inhabitants in 2050, well up from today's 36 million or so, which while a mere handful in comparison with Brazil's 244 million should be enough to keep the place running smoothly. 

Like everything else, trends change so it would be astonishing if when 2050 dawned the population figures turned out to be just as the UN had predicted half a century before. In addition to breeding many home-grown babies, Britain will probably import far more people than expected, with a lot of them coming from the neighbouring continent, because its culture has become notably cosmopolitan of late and, anyway, English is now everybody's favorite second language. After much grumbling by patriots worried about the national essence, France may do so as well. A colonial background have its advantages. 

As we live in an age dominated by economics, what bothers Europeans most is the likely effect of population decline and population aging on their bank accounts. Although Spain's economy is currently expanding fast, within a decade or so the lack of young go-getters will surely slow it down. As for Italy, in part because paying for all those pensions is becoming more and more a complicated issue. With the exception of Britain and Holland, European countries have hardly any pension funds at all. 

The obvious way out of the demographic trap would be large-scale immigration. This is appreciated in the United States but in most other parts of the rich world the very idea of making room for millions, in some cases, tens of millions, of people from Africa, south Asia and Latin America is regarded with fear. Many feel it is yet another facet of "globalization" and suspect that migrants, as well as looking scruffy, cooking smelly foods, working for a pittance, driving up the crime rate and producing large quantities of squalling babies at public expense, from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, the charge sheet is almost the same, will deprive them not only of their jobs but also of their own cultures which, they complain, are already endangered by the US. 

The scenario to install the message of sustainable use in our latitudes seems more challenging than ever. The outcome of the IWMC 2nd Symposium ratifies the necessity to encourage public awareness on sustainable use issues, and from here we look forward to stretch cooperation and work out a global strategy.�
  

Iceland’s actions are seen as important in view of the pressure to extend CITES regulatory influence over virtually all species “taken from the sea” including species involved in commercial fisheries worldwide. Iceland has officially notified the CITES Secretariat that it will take reservations regarding a variety of cetaceans including: fin, sei, sperm, blue, minke, bottlenose, killer and humpback whales as well as white-beaked, white-sided, common, and bottlenose dolphins and harbour porpoise. The Icelandic parliament approved the effort prior to Christmas. The Ukraine joined without reservations to any CITES action.�
  

Acknowledging that scientific data demonstrated the propriety of removing the Eastern North Pacific stock of gray whales and minke whale stocks in the southern hemisphere, Okhotsk Sea/Western Pacific, Northeast and North Central Atlantic, the Secretariat’s support, however, had certain provisions attached.  Those provisions include the dropping of reservations on minke whale stocks by Japan and Norway, a zero trade quota for minke whales and compliance with trade reporting mechanisms by Norway. 

Regarding the Cuban proposal, on the contrary, the Secretariat does not attach any additional conditions to those included in the proposal itself, in particular Cuba’s abandonment of its reservation on hawksbills, the export of a maximum 6,900 kg of registered stocks of scales or carapaces and an annual quota representing the harvest of no more than 500 individual turtles. On the contrary, the Secretariat indicated that ”the most likely impact of the proposed trade will be positive, i.e. justifying the level of controls in place domestically, supporting community and economic development in the broader sense, and contributing to the monitoring of turtle populations and the maintenance of trade control measures”. IWMC cannot add more to such a statement.

As predicted, the United States voiced early objections to both whale and sea turtle down-listing proposals.  In letters to CITES authorities in Japan and Cuba, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service expressed its opposition that is heavily influenced by the no-whaling ideology of extreme environmental and animal rights NGOs.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pointed to IWC’s missing “Revised Management Scheme” (more than a decade delayed in its adoption) and insistence that any nation or culture that consumes whales is engaged in “commercial whaling” as the basis for the US opposition.  (Ironically, US citizens who consume whales are considered by US F&WS as merely engaging in approved “subsistence” hunting). Similarly US F&WS rational for US opposition to the hawksbill proposal consisted of decades old studies and the insistence that highly regulated and limited trade in hawksbill shell would somehow stimulate the already illegal and unregulated trade in that resource elsewhere around the world.

Both proposals will test the support for sustainable use at COP 11 and are the subject of on-going international lobby efforts to defeat them by the so-called “like-minded” nations that include the US, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.�
  

Throughout the latter days of 1999, Greenpeace issued a sleet of press releases about Japan’s whale research fleet sailing throughout Antarctica in search of minke specimens.  Greenpeace labeled the research effort in the press as “illegally hunting” 440 whales.  Nowhere in Greenpeace’s literature is the basis for the claim that the Japanese research is “illegal”. The inference is that the Japanese effort is in conflict with the International Whaling Commission (IWC) whaling ban. It’s not. Such research is perfectly legal under IWC regulations. Instead, Greenpeace acknowledged privately that it is basing its claim of “illegality” on its own reading of the Law of the Seas Treaty regarding cooperation of nations. 

Ironically, while Greenpeace vessels and personnel continually assaulted and rammed the Japanese research vessels, Greenpeace insists that the Japanese have employed “violent” tactics against Greenpeace’s inflatable attack craft launched from its mothership, Arctic Sunrise. The extent of the Japanese “violence” was the employment of a water hose spraying Greenpeace boarding craft “swarming” (Greenpeace’s term) Japanese sailors.�
  

The symposium will be hosted by IUCN’s Sustainable Use Initiative; IUCN’s Regional Sustainable Use Specialist Groups of West, Central, North, Eastern, and Southern Africa; and Africa Resources Trust (ART). For more information contact IUCN’s Sustainable Use Initiative African Regional Coordinator, in Yaounde, Cameroon (tel: (237) 216-496; fax: (237) 216-497) or Marianne Courouble, Africa Resource Trust, Paris Office at tel/fax: 33(1) 4651-8864.�
  

In an article appearing in the Dallas (Texas) Morning News, Ms. Jones described the cultural paralysis wreaked by the seal fur ban. Unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, HIV, and suicide among traditional hunting communities is linked directly to the collapse of the US and European seal fur markets in the 1970s and 1980s. Campaigns by self-styled environmental groups such as International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) claimed that seal hunters over-harvested fur seals and that they “clubbed baby seals”. 

The article accurately (if conservatively) described the vast harp seal population of some four million versus the limited numbers taken by Greenland Inuit (70,000). It also described the frustration of seal hunters who described measures such as the European  Union ban and the US Marine Mammal Protection Act seal product import ban as “canceling our culture” to a people who can’t harvest crops or farm frozen land. An effort by Greenland’s trade ministers to the ill-fated Seattle WTO meetings failed to insert an “indigenous people’s” trade item on the aborted agenda. Still Greenland is striving to change European minds about wearing sealskin clothing and footwear.  Nothing less than that country’s people and the seal resource’s fate depend upon their success.�
  

NTA President David Sollman said the ruling affirmed the government’s duty to “protect, manage, and conserve renewable wildlife resources” under the “public trust doctrine” could not be usurped by popular vote. NTA acknowledges that the ruling will ultimately be upheld or overturned by appellate courts. The Colorado trap ban was put on the ballot under the anti-trapping agenda of animal rights groups led by The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).�
  

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