“Icelandic Whales Will Be Safe In 2020”: Iceland Announce No Whale Hunts For Second Year In A Row
Campaigners say the move is “the end of Icelandic whaling” as the industry continues to suffer from waning public support and declining profits.
"I'm never going to hunt whales again, I'm stopping for good," Gunnar Bergmann Jonsson, the Managing Director of Iceland’s minke whaling company IP-Utgerd, recently told the press.
His company’s decision to move away from the whaling industry represents a wider industry shift in Iceland, as demand for whaling in the country continues to decline. For the second year in a row, Iceland’s whaling companies will once again not go whaling this year.
A combination of factors, including the rising cost of exporting whale meat, and the fact that tourists are choosing to go whale watching rather than wanting to eat them as a delicacy, means the industry has struggled with falling profits.
These changes have been made worse with the current pandemic’s social distancing rules, which have made protecting crews and processing whale meat increasingly difficult.
“It is now clear that what we are seeing is the end of Icelandic whaling, which is good news for whales, good news for Iceland and good news for marine conservation worldwide”, says Patrick Ramage, IFAW’s Marine Conservation Programme Director.
IFAW report that over 1,500 fin and minke whales have been killed in Iceland since the country resumed commercial whaling in 2003. Fin whales are the second largest animal on Earth.
“IFAW salutes and commends our longtime partners and friends in Iceland who have been working to end the cruel and wasteful killing of fin whales and minke whales in Icelandic waters and finally to end consumption of whale meat by international tourists”.
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