Monaco - 09 February 2001: The IWMC World Conservation Trust today urged all member nations of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), to put aside their differences and work towards the completion and implementation of the Revised Management Scheme (RMS) for whaling.

"Too many nations remain stuck in the quagmire of whaling practices of the past when they should be focussing on the sustainable whaling of today," IWMC President Eugene Lapointe said today.

"Whaling today does not distinguish between commercial and non-commercial, subsistence or aboriginal; whaling nations today are concerned only whether whaling is sustainable or non-sustainable. Non-sustainable whaling must never occur again."

Mr. Lapointe said some nations are misleading people by saying that lifting the whaling moratorium would result in a return to Industrial Whaling of the past. "By relating today's sustainable whaling to the whaling of the past, anti-whaling proponents are attempting to create the perception that there will be return to large scale, industrial whaling when this is not true."

"Today's whaling is a far cry from the Industrial Whaling carried out by the United States and the United Kingdom and other countries to obtain oil; now that oil can be synthetically made. Today's whaling is concerned only with food and ensuring that food supply continues for future generations."

"To push commercialism as the ogre that will bring about unsustainable practices is devious and wrong. If something is carried out on a sustainable basis, it is irrelevant whether the byproduct is sold commercially or not. It is whether the practice is sustainable that counts," Mr. Lapointe said.

Mr. Lapointe also said that completion of the RMS and its implementation would mean that the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) would have been adhered to, even if it took more than 54 years to do so by member nations.

"The International Whaling Commission, set up under the ICRW, was established to bring about the orderly development of the whaling industry," he said. "Unfortunately, over the years it was hijacked by certain interests who saw the moratorium as the only way of atoning for their actions of the past."

"But with the completion and implementation of the Revised Management Scheme, all countries can rest assured practices of the past are not repeated and that some countries can continue with their own cultural practices that need to be preserved for the future," Mr. Lapointe said.

IWMC - World Conservation Trust is an international organization devoted to the promotion of sustainable use as a conservation mechanism, to the protection of sovereign rights of independent nations and to the respect of cultures and traditions.

For more information and interviews, contact Eugene Lapointe
Email: iwmc@iwmc.org

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