Towards a Management Regime?

After more than 10 years of work within the IWC there is still no agreement on a revised management regime. Each time a solution seems close, as it did in 1992 when there was an agreement on how to calculate quotas, new demands are brought forward in order to make the regime more comprehensive. Some members of the IWC do not participate in the negotiations on a modern management regime because the obvious consequence of adopting it would be to lift the moratorium and reopen commercial whaling. Others distinguish a difference between the adoption of a management regime and the lifting of the moratorium. These countries can accept the establishment of a new regime, in preparation for the eventuality that commercial whaling should become relevant within the IWC at some point in the future. The purpose of negotiations in this case appears to be to play for time, in an effort to make the eventual regime as comprehensive and expensive as possible, in order to render future whaling complex and unprofitable.

All the great whales are protected today by the IWC. The model for calculating quotas agreed upon as a central element of a future management regime in 1992, would provide catch quotas for stocks that can sustain harvesting, and zero quotas for those that would need protection. The model requires the use of stock estimates accepted by the Scientific Committee of the IWC. When, or if, the IWC implements the model for calculating quotas, the special whale sanctuaries will become superfluous as a management tool.