Tourist worries for Iceland over whaling
Date: 28-Oct-03
Country: ICELAND
Author: Alister Doyle
Icelandic whalers harpooned 36 minke whales in August and September for their first hunts since 1989 in what Reykjavik says is a three-year scientific study of whether whales are a threat to vital fish stocks.
"It has not had any economic effect after this summer," Prime Minister David Oddsson told Reuters on Sunday when asked if Iceland had felt any impact from a barrage of criticism, including U.S. threats of trade sanctions.
"I have to admit that some people in the tourism organisations in Iceland are worried about the future, the two years still to come," he said on the fringes of a meeting of Nordic and Baltic prime ministers in Oslo.
Iceland announced its decision to start the three-year catches in July - too late, Oddsson said, for foreigners to change their 2003 summer holiday plans.
"This decision is a delicate question, I must admit," he said. "We have to be delicate about how we manage this the next two years."
"It would be foolish not to say that it would affect in some way our tourism, but not on a big scale," he added.
He said that Iceland stood by the decision to hunt whales, despite a moratorium on killing the sea mammals agreed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) after many species were hunted almost to extinction.
"We had every right to do it," he said.
Reykjavik says some 43,000 minke whales live in Icelandic waters, eating two million tonnes of fish and krill every year. Opinion polls in Iceland show that up to 75 percent of Icelanders support the hunts.
Norway and Japan, the other main whaling nations alongside Iceland, also argue that stocks of minke whale have recovered. They have repeatedly urged the IWC in vain to approve the hunts.
Minke whale meat is sold in shops and restaurants in all three nations. The High North Alliance, a Norwegian-based pro-whaling lobby, says any U.S. trade sanctions because of whaling would violate World Trade Organisation rules.
