Iceland, Norway and Japan are the only countries in the world to allow this hunt.
Le Monde with AFP
Faced with a demand at the lowest, Iceland, one of the last three countries in the world still practice whaling, intends to cease activity from 2024, announced Friday 4 February the Minister of the Fishing.
“Unless otherwise indicated, there is little reason to allow whaling from 2024”, when the current quotas expire, said Minister Svandis Svavarsdottir, member of the Left Party Ecologist. power in Iceland. “There is little evidence that there is an economic advantage in this activity,” she highlights in a tribune published by the Morgunbladid daily.
Iceland, Norway and Japan are the only countries in the world to allow whaling hunting. Reassessed in 2019, Icelandic quotas authorize each year 209 jacks for the Common Writer, second largest marine mammal after blue whale, and 217 for Minke’s whale (also called small whale), one of the smallest cetaceans, so far at the end of 2023.
Difficult competition with Japan
But for three years, the two main companies holding a license are stopped, and one of them announced in the spring of 2020 definitively to stink his harpons. Only an animal has been harporned during the last three summer seasons, a small whale in 2021. At issue: the difficult competition with Japan – the main market for whaling – where the commercial hunt has taken over since 2019 after the withdrawal of Tokyo of the International Whaling Commission (CBI).
In 2018, the last summer of whale hunting in the Icelandic waters, 146 common whales and six minke whales were harponed. The commercial hunting at the whale was prohibited in 1986 by the CBI but Iceland, which had opposed this moratorium, took over since 2003. Only the blue whale hunting, prohibited by the Commission, the Commission. is also in Iceland.