Norway seeks to destroy whale blubber mountain
Date: 23-May-02
Country: NORWAY
Author: Alister Doyle
Whalers said that the offer, of four Norwegian crowns ($0.49) a kilo (2.2 lbs) to help get rid of ageing blubber packed into freezers in northern Norway, was too low.
Norway's whalers have been stockpiling blubber since Norway resumed commercial hunts of minke whales in 1993 in defiance of a moratorium by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which is currently holding an annual meeting in Japan.
The whalers had been hoping to export the creamy fat to Japan, where blubber is a delicacy and might be worth 150 crowns a kilo. But that plan failed to take off even though Norway gave an official green light for exports last year.
"This is old blubber that has been in store so long that there is no market for it," Johan Williams, director general at the Fisheries Ministry, told Reuters.
"This doesn't mean we've given up the idea of exports," he added. Norwegians dislike blubber, which whalers say stays edible even after several years in a freezer, and only eat the minke whale meat.
If destroyed, the fat might end up as fuel in a power station.
Norway's export plans, defying a convention on trade in endangered species, have stalled with some Japanese consumer groups saying Norwegian whale meat contains cancer-causing chemicals from the North Atlantic.
"It's good that the ministry is trying to help. But four crowns a kilo won't even cover transport costs," Jan Kristiansen, representing whalers, told Norway's NTB news agency.
"The buyers have paid up to seven crowns for the blubber, so they will lose," he said. He said that Norway and Japan seemed happy not to push for exports to avert international protests - a charge denied by Williams.
"We're not going to pay for everything. We expect that both the buyers who speculated in profits from blubber and the fishermen should contribute to this project," he said.
The IWC has repeatedly rejected pleas by Norway, Japan and Iceland to approve a resumption of whaling.
The whaling nations argue that stocks of minke whales are plentiful, unlike other species like the giant blue whale. Norway has set a quota of 674 minke whales for this season.
