We’re coming up to the last weeks of the Icelandic commercial whale hunt, and I couldn’t be more pleased at what a disaster it has been. Of the 29 minke and 2 fin whales in the 2007 hunting quota, they haven’t even caught 10 minkes.

Iceland’s decision last year to resume commercial whaling caused an international ruckus. But more importantly, it hasn’t enjoyed the unified flag-waving patriotic support that it used to. Witness this bit of commentary from DavidMixner.com:

Icelanders too, are not universally happy about the resumption of whaling. Most are acutely aware that the $1 billion earned from fishery exports account for 50% of their foreign currency earnings, and that there is a real need to diversify their economy. Of all the other economic sectors, tourism is the fastest growing (7% per year), earning over $300 million in export revenues. A Gallup poll suggested that 48 per cent of Icelanders believed that resuming whaling would have ‘a rather negative or very negative impact on Iceland’s tourism industry’. Greenpeace can also attest to this as they have a list of over 110,000 people who pledged that they would visit Iceland only if the country stopped commercial whaling. This represents $115 million in potential income that quite heavily outweighs the potential $3-4 million in value generated by whaling. At the end of the day, it is Iceland’s world-class whale-watching tourism ventures that take the financial hit.

The Iceland Whales Pledge was a campaign that was cooked up in two very fast weeks some years ago when Iceland announced it was going to expand it’s whaling program from dozens of whales to hundreds.
The Rainbow Warrior was on its way to take action in the Mediterranean, but our Executive Director, in one of those moves only an Executive Director can make, ordered the boat to Iceland and gave us the transit time to come up with a plan.

Andrew Davies was the guy who sparked this idea, a “reverse boycott” as he called it, and it fit perfectly into our lead campaigner’s concept: don’t confront the whalers head on — that just made domestic dissenters look like traitors. But woo and win the forces within Iceland, be they principled, economic, or political, to challenge it domestically.

It worked then — Iceland abandoned the expansion plan — and with continued slow, steady pressure, I’m confident Iceland will come around to realizing stopping whaling isn’t simply a rainbow-colored item on some foreign hippy agenda, it’s a sound economic move.

In other news, word on the grapevine has it that Norway’s whalers are a pretty glum lot at the moment as well — they’ve also failed to catch their annual quota.

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