Secret plans by the South Korean Government to build a whale and dolphin meat processing factory, despite an international ban on whaling, have been exposed
The international hunting of whales is banned but South Korean Government figures show that 'accidental' catches of whales in their waters are up to 100 times greater than other countries.
While South Korea has no official whaling industry, if a whale or dolphin is caught in a fishing net it can be sold for a huge price. In 2004, the average price of a mature minke whale was US$100,000.
So in recent years the whaling industry has been trying out a different defense — that whale populations need to be culled to reduce their threat to fast-disappearing fish stocks. Whales, after all, eat a lot of seafood, so it would make sense that controlling whale populations would be smart "ecosystem management," as whaling supporters put it.
But a new article in the Feb. 13 issue of Science demonstrates that's hardly the case. "Essentially what we found was that...if you remove whales, it has a negligible impact on the biomass that is commercially available for fishing," says Leah Gerber, a conservation biologist at Arizona State University and the article's lead author. Translation: killing whales won't resuscitate depleted fisheries. It turned out that whale numbers had little impact on commercial fish populations, in part because the kind of sea life whales like to eat — krill, plankton — is highly unlikely to end up on your dinner plate. "The seafood that people prefer is higher on the food web than [whales' diet]," says Gerber. There's also the undeniable fact that today's whale populations are still just a fraction of what they were in the days when Captain Ahab was (unsuccessfully) whaling, yet commercial fish populations are still dwindling. 0015名無しさん2009/02/19(木) 03:40:31ID:Zk+KHHiThttp://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-whales14-2009feb14,0,5110794.story By John M. Glionna February 14, 2009 Los Angeles Times TOKYO He and fellow Greenpeace activist Toru Suzuki had tracked the package to a mail depot in northern Japan after tipsters told them it contained whale meat bound for the country's black market, smuggled by crew members of a ship commissioned to kill the mammals for scientific research, not profit. But when they held a cameras-flashing news conference last spring to turn the meat over to police, the officers instead arrested the activists for trespass and theft.
After the arrest of the two activists, Greenpeace supporters sent 250,000 letters to Japanese prosecutors and a delegation handed a letter of protest to the office of Prime Minister Taro Aso.
Sato, a 32-year-old former English teacher, said he was unaware of the international protest against Japan's whaling until he joined Greenpeace a few years ago. "The more I read about the issue, the more I realized that what the Japanese government is telling the public is a lie," he said. "I wanted to make this a Japanese issue." He said activists received a tip last year that a package labeled as having "cardboard" contents would contain illegal whale meat. They intercepted the box and later opened it at a nearby hotel, shocked at what they found inside. "We expected the media to support us," said Suzuki, 42, who once owned a motorcycle repair firm. "But they turned against us."
Lawyers say the men's rights were violated.
"They took a stand against Japan's national policy," defense attorney Yuichi Kaido said. "So they are being harshly punished."