The Obama administration's position on whaling

FPC Briefing
Cristián Maquieira
Chair, International Whaling Commission
Monica Medina, U.S. Commissioner, International Whaling Commission
Foreign Press Center
Washington, DC
May 27, 2010

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MS. MEDINA: Good morning. Again, my name is Monica Medina and I’m the U.S. Commissioner to the IWC. I want to begin by saying that the U.S. commends Chairman Maquieira for his leadership during this difficult time for the IWC and this most intense process. And I want to say that we, the U.S., agree with his assessment that the IWC is fundamentally broken and must be fixed.

The goal of the United States in this process has been, and will continue to be, to conserve whales. The Administration recognizes that there are significant benefits outlined in the proposal that has been put forward by the chair and vice chair of the commission. And we will continue to work with them on the proposal, but we don’t believe it’s in a place where we can accept it yet.

As you may know, the process began several years ago. The Obama Administration inherited the process. We joined it midstream. But we decided it would be best to try and work through the process to attempt to fix the IWC and to achieve the goal that we seek of greater conservation for whales. We’ve worked diligently alongside the chair and the other members of the commission who have been supporting him in this process and we will continue to work hard through the end of the annual meeting. We’ll continue to work to see if there’s a way to find a diplomatic solution.

That said, it must meet our objectives to improve the conservation of whales, to better coordinate research on whales, and to address new and emerging threats to cetaceans such as climate change and ocean noise. If we don’t see that the IWC is going to be able to do those things in this new – under the new agreement, we wouldn’t go forward with it. But we are hopeful and optimistic that we can reach agreement because the alternative is the status quo, which has been a deadlock in the IWC and a failure in the IWC to actually achieve our objectives as I just stated them.

So we will continue to work hard through this process. We, as I said, don’t believe the proposal as it’s currently drafted is sufficient, but we do believe it was a good basis for us to begin our negotiations in earnest. And we have about five weeks to go, and hopefully we’ll find a solution. Thank you.

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MS. MEDINA: Sure. We would like to see lower numbers. That’s clearly a very important objective. And whaling in sanctuaries is a very difficult prospect. And we would prefer to see no whaling in sanctuaries, frankly, and there is currently a lot of whaling that goes on in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary. We don’t think that that’s appropriate. We also think that the numbers for the other whaling nations also need to come down in the proposal. We believe that there is another principle regarding international trade that’s very important. The current proposal has text that requires that any whale meat and whale products be used domestically by the countries that catch them, but it’s in brackets.