STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- NEW: Australia and New Zealand categorical dismay over announcement
- South Korea says whales are disrupting fishermen's activities
- Official increases the chance of looking minke whales off the Korean Peninsula
- Environmental crew says the transfer is a "thinly veiled try to" perform business whaling
Seoul, South Korea (CNN) -- South Korea is thinking about looking whales within the waters off its shorelines for what it says are medical purposes, drawing grievance from environmental teams and international locations across the Pacific Rim.
Citing calls from fishermen for a resumption of restricted whaling, the top of the South Korean delegation to the Global Whaling Commission, Kang Joon-suk, stated Wednesday that Seoul was engaged on a suggestion to seek minke whales migrating off the Korean Peninsula.
Korean fishermen whinge the whales are disrupting their fishing actions and consuming fish stocks, Kang stated on the commission's annual assembly in Panama. Nonlethal measures aren't sufficient to evaluate the whales' numbers and feeding habits, he said.
But environmental companies had been skeptical in regards to the South Korean explanation.
"We imagine this transfer is a thinly veiled try by Korea to behavior industrial whaling below the guise of clinical research, very similar to hunts carried out by Japan within the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary," stated Wendy Elliott, head of worldwide Natural world Fund's delegation to the whaling commission.
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Japan hunts whales once a year in spite of a global moratorium in position because the 1980s, using a loophole within the legislation that permits for killing the mammals for clinical research.
Environmental activists just like the group Sea Shepherd observe the japanese hunters, dealing with off with them in a prime seas drama that has resulted in collisions of ships, the detaining of activists and the firing of smoke bombs.
South Korea intends to pursue the same way to Japan by filing an offer to the Clinical Committee of the Global Whaling Commission.
Other international locations within the area reacted to Seoul's plans with dismay.
"I am very disenchanted by this statement by South Korea," Top Minister Julia Gillard of Australia stated Thursday. "WE'RE totally against whaling; there is not any excuse for medical whaling."
Gillard stated she had urged the Australian ambassador to South Korea to take the problem up "on the easiest ranges of the Korean government."
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New Zealand intends to take identical motion over the situation, Overseas Minister Murray McCully said, suggesting that South Korea's plans may undermine the status of the World Whaling Commission.
The declaration "will placed additional drive on a company that already has vital problem maintaining itself as a reputable global institution," he said.
The minke whales that might be the objective of South Korea's proposed hunt are regarded as endangered by the whaling commission's Medical Committee, WWF mentioned in a statement.
But Seoul is suggesting that the selection of minke whales within the north Pacific has "recovered considerably."
In his remark to the whaling commission, South Korea's Kang mentioned that his country's "whaling historical past dates again to prehistoric times, and whale meat remains to be a part of a culinary custom of a few of Korea's native spaces similar to Ulsan."
Before the world moratorium got here into impact in 1986, Koreans have been catching approximately 1,000 minke whales per annum within the waters across the peninsula, he said.
But his declare that the whales have been now making existence tricky for fishermen didn't provoke environmental groups.
"Blaming whales for declining fish populations is like blaming woodpeckers for deforestation," Greenpeace mentioned in a press release. "Whales don't lead to declines in fishing stocks, over fishing and mismanagement by people do."
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CNN's K.J. Kwon contributed to this report.
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