Environmentalists Want Chile's Waters To Become A Whale Sanctuary

Although Chile's Administrative Fishery Law protects the Cetacean species in Chilean waters until 2025, environmentalist groups want all waterways in the country declared a whale sanctuary. The Cetacean Conservation Center, together with 4 senators, presented Monday to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet the petition to proclaim Chile's territorial waters as whale sanctuary.

The petition was proposed on October by the CCC, the Ecoceanos Center, the National Confederation of Artesanal Fisherman and 15 more Latin American NGOs. Since then more than 90 conservation and tourism groups locally and overseas supported the initiative.

It asked Ms. Bachelet to issue a presidential decree proclaiming the nation's sea territory and exclusive economic zone a whale sanctuary, even making its waters off limits to scientific and commercial hunting operations.

Chilean Environment Minister Elsa Cabrera explained, "Chile has the responsibility to send a strong political signal to the international community regarding its commitment to the conservation and non-lethal use of these marine mammals by calling Chile's waters a whale sanctuary."

It will even go beyond Iceland's stop to commercial whale hunting on August. The Reyjavik directive still allowed a quota of 30 minke whales and 9 fins, although there was no market even for the 7 minkes and 7 fin whales caught due to lack of contamination test results on the whale meat.

But the bigger push for environmentalists' proposal to make the entire country a whale sanctuary was Japan's persistence to continue whale hunting in Antarctic, Australian and New Zealand waters. Japan has a target harvest of 1,035 whales made up of 50 fin whales, 50 humpback whales and 935 minke whales, on the pretext of using the species for research.

Supporters are targeting the passage of the law before the 60th yearly meeting of the International Whaling Commission on June 2008 in Chile.