Media Release: 10 April 2000
WHALE MANAGEMENT: 
THE KEY TO A BALANCED GLOBAL ECOSYSTEM

By: Eugene Lapointe
President IWMC-World Conservation Trust
Former Secretary General of CITES (1982-1990)

For whales to survive and thrive, the end goal that should be at the heart of every vote by every delegate to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and CITES, is adherence to a simple principle: whales must be part of the process, not kept apart from the process of securing a balanced global ecosystem.

The NGO and “like-minded” nations’ position that humans must assume a total hands-off relationship with whales flies in the face of sound and scientific resource management.  Global biological diversity is important to a balanced ecosystem.  It demands that individual species not be allowed to crowd out or trample other species and resources within their habitat. 

Yet, the extreme NGOs and “like-minded” nations such as the U.S. and Great Britain appear to be oblivious to that fact by virtue of their resistance to any active management system involving whales.  They have no concern for the protection of biological or cultural diversity among humankind.  And their refusal to recognize the validity of the desire by island, coastal and other whaling nations to feed their people something other than Western hemisphere fast or processed foods is cultural elitism at its worst.

Further, if the extreme animal rights and environmental NGOs truly wished to help whales and other marine species, they would spend the untold millions they collect for those purposes on finding real solutions to the real problem threatening whales and marine species, namely pollution.  They may complain about pollution but they do nothing to stop it.

IWC as an institution has a noble mission, to regulate whaling in an economically and environmentally sustainable fashion.  That it is held hostage by NGOs and major nations with agendas other than IWC’s chartered mandate should not influence CITES’ delegates to reward or ratify such organizational usurpers with their votes. 

CITES delegates to COP 11 should decide upon the merits of the whale proposals based upon CITES’ criteria and whether or not the species in question are currently threatened with extinction by virtue of international trade pressure.  To do otherwise undermines the right of all marine species, including the whales, and the right of humans to exist in the give and take flux of the truly biologically diverse and balanced ecosystem we call earth.

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