International Whaling Commission

The International Whaling Commission (IWC), based in Cambridge, England, is an agency made up of member nations that have signed the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. At its founding, the IWC had sixteen members, but over the years, the number of members of the commission has ranged from fourteen to fifty-two; as of 2002, there were forty-eight members. Since 1949, the commission has been holding annual meetings to set regulations for whaling in most of the world's seas, and these meetings have often been the scene of bruising battles among whalers, scientists, and environmentalists.

(Each IWC member appoints one commissioner, who is usually a government official and holds voting power, and any number of members to its delegation whose composition typically includes scientists, environmentalists, or whalers.) The whaling commission should be thought of not just as an organization that deals with whaling, but also as one of the first to wrestle with the problems of environmental diplomacy, such as sovereignty issues, scientific uncertainty, arid conflicting national interests. However one views the actions of the IWC, its longevity in the face of repeated crises has been remarkable.

The central challenge for the IWC came from the terms of the founding convention, which charged the commission with promoting the orderly development of the whaling industry and the conservation of whales. These two goals have often been in conflict. Through the 1960s, the members of the commission generally split into two groups: scientists who wanted stricter limits on whaling and the whalers who opposed them. As one observer noted, the whaling industry generally had the whip hand in these confrontations.

The central point of disagreement was the quota set on Antarctic whaling by the schedule, the part of the 1946 convention that set rules for whaling in the Antarctic seas. The framers of the schedule had established a quota of 16,000 blue whale units for the South Seas, with a unit equaling one blue whale, two fin whales, two and a half humpbacks, or six sei whales.

By 1950, the scientists were already leaning toward reducing the quota in the name of conservation, and they succeeded in a small way, but attempts in the late 1950s and early 1960s to make major cuts constantly hit the problem of the objection clause in the schedule. Under this clause, any member could exempt itself from an amendment simply by filing an objection. It thus became impossible to cut the quota without unanimous consent, and the whalers were powerful enough to make sure that the scientists never got their way.

Beginning in the 1970s, the IWC became well known around the world, as the Save the Whales movement blamed it in part for the decimation of the world's whale populations. Driven by their desire to impose a moratorium on commercial whaling, environmentalists slowly gained control of the commission's annual meetings, both by encouraging nonwhaling nations to join and vote against whaling activities and by lobbying the governments of longtime members.

Simultaneously, the IWC was becoming a center for extensive research on whales. In a three-cornered debate, the environmentalists prevailed over the scientists and whalers with the 1982 decision to ban all commercial whaling later that decade. Since 1982, debate within the IWC has been focused largely on Japanese efforts to conduct scientific research on minke whales. Most environmentalists see that activity as a screen to cover up commercial whaling, but many scientists see it as a legitimate means of learning about whales.