A bid to make the entire South Atlantic Ocean a sanctuary for whales was knocked down by Norway, Japan, and other whale hunting countries at the International Whale Commissions annual meeting on Monday in Panama City.
The measure was proposed by a number of South American countries, particularly under the effort of Jose Truda Palazzo of Cetacean Conservation Center in Brazil as an effort to preserve and save lives of the enormous sea mammals.
The proposal was recommended in 1999 and would have created a safe zone for whales from the waters between South America and south of the equator in Africa up till the existing sanctuary in the Antarctic.
The proposal received 39 positive votes, 21 opposing votes and two abstentions. While more countries supported the idea of the sanctuary, it did not manage to get quorum and thus failed.
Experts are pointing fingers at Japan, which is a big whaling country, for influencing its allies for voting against the proposal.
Palazzo told the Agence-France-Presse "You can't really believe that Nauru or Tuvalu has an interest or has studied the sanctuary. They are voting because Japan tells them to."
Patrick Ramage, Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Global Whale Program told the Las Angeles Times, "We are extremely disappointed that the whaling bloc has harpooned the sanctuary proposal despite support of a clear majority ...opposition led by Japan -- a country not even in this region."
Japan, in turn, argues that the sanctuary impedes the socio-cultural environment of whaling countries, and that the measure was completely superfluous like "building a roof on top of a roof," as reported by the L.A. Times.
The International Whaling Commission is an organization set up in 1946 to protect and conserve whales, which are now are endangered species.
