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Norway to Export Whale Products Despite World Ban
PLEASE BOYCOTT ALL NORWEGIAN PRODUCTS IMMEDIATELY! TAKE
THE EXTRA THREE SECONDS TO READ THE LABELS ON FISH PRODUCTS,
FURNITURE, HARDWARE AND CANNED GOODS, AND PUT THEM BACK ON
THE SHELF. (LET YOUR STORE KNOW WHY YOU ARE DOING THIS. THIS
WILL DEFINITELY IMPACT THE NORWEGIAN ECONOMY)
Reuters Jan 16 2001 1:02PM OSLO (Reuters) - Norway,
defying an international trade ban, said on Tuesday it would
allow exports of whale meat and blubber to Japan.
"The government has decided to allow exports,
Fisheries Minister Otto Gregussen told a news conference.
"It will probably take several weeks before we're
ready."
Norway resumed hunting minke whales in 1993 despite an
global moratorium but has refused whalers' pleas for export
licenses for some 600 tonnes of blubber and other products
frozen in warehouses in northern Norway.
Gregussen said Norway would permit exports once Norway
had set up a system of DNA genetic testing to track all
exports. It allowed whalers to catch 655 of the mammals in
the northeast Atlantic last year.
He said the main market would be Japan, another whaling
nation, followed by Iceland and Peru. Norway would only
allow exports to nations also able to do genetic testing.
Oslo has lobbied for years to persuade the world to ease
a ban on exports under the Convention on International Trade
in Endangered Species (CITES) and the moratorium on hunts by
the International Whaling Commission.
Oslo and its three target export markets have never
formally ratified the CITES ban.
Foreign Minister Thorbjoern Jagland said he did not
believe that Norway would be exposed to international
sanctions over the resumption of exports. The United States
has in the past been among nations criticizing Norway's
whale hunts.
"We have no reason to believe that there will be
major international reactions," he said.
Jagland said it was a waste of resources to store blubber
in freezers in Norway when there was strong demand in Japan.
Yet the export decision marks a shift in Oslo's previous
insistence that whaling is part of deep-rooted coastal
traditions, forgotten by many other western nations, and is
to satisfy domestic demand.
Norwegians eat the meat of minke whales, often fried as
steaks. The blubber, the whale's fatty outer layer, is a
delicacy in Japan.
"This is not surprising but it is very
disappointing," Frode Pleym, a Greenpeace spokesman,
said of whale exports.
Whalers rejoiced at the export decision and said it would
help tiny coastal villages in north Norway.
"There is a considerable potential for this
business," Ole Mindor Myklebust, a fisherman and
prospective exporter, told Reuters. "We have to build
up hunts again. It's 15 years since we had considerable
hunts and exports."
Myklebust, wearing a sealskin coat, estimated that the
600 tonnes of whale products stored in north Norway were
worth about 93 million crowns ($10.65 million) at average
price of 155 crowns a kilo (2.2 lb).
Whalers have in the past wanted to export products
including whale skeletons, as possible exhibits in foreign
museums, or penises, viewed as aphrodisiacs in the Far East.
($1-8.730 Norwegian Crown)