“JAPAN threatens to quit whaling forum.” It’s a headline we have got used to reading, but behind the rhetoric this year’s meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) saw a shift in power that has put Japan in a bind.
For years, Japan has been convincing developing nations to join the IWC, using the inducement of aid to form a pro-whaling bloc – or so its opponents claim. Last year it even obtained a one-vote majority in favour of overturning the IWC’s 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, though the vote fell short of the three-quarters majority needed to end the ban.…
