Norway to End Its Commercial Whale Hunting

OSLO —  Norway, bowing to international pressure, announced Wednesday that it will end commercial whaling next year.

Foreign Minister Knut Frydenlund told a news conference that whaling will be scaled down at the end of the current season and stop next year. Norway will, however, continue catching whales for “scientific” purposes.

Norway is the last member of the International Whaling Commission to agree to stop whaling. Iceland, Japan, the Soviet Union and South Korea still hunt whales but have agreed in principle to stop.

A spokesman for the environmental group Greenpeace, which has been trying to disrupt whaling off northern Norway, said by radio from the protest ship Moby Dick that the vessel will give up its four-week-old protest. It has been seized three times in three weeks for illegally entering Norwegian waters.

Norway said it plans to continue hunting Minke whales to determine their numbers.

A spokesman for Greenpeace said before the decision that hunting whales for scientific reasons would be a pretext for killing them for money.

Norway has scaled down its annual quota of Minke whales to 400 this year, from almost 2,000 in the early 1980s, but the industry has been a severe embarrassment for the seven-week-old Labor government of Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who heads a U.N. environmental commission.

The government said in a statement that it would set up a study group to examine differing claims by scientists as to the size of Minke whale stocks. Norway had resisted all efforts to halt Minke whaling, rejecting arguments that whales are in danger of extinction.

The United States had planned to impose sanctions on Norway under a 1979 anti-whaling law. Norway’s whaling profit is a small fraction of its salmon export, much of which goes to the United States.

Norway stopped factory farming of whales in 1967 and the industry is now small, with whaling limited to the Minke, which inhabits the waters of the northeast Atlantic.

Fisheries Minister Bjarne Moerk Eidem, an ardent supporter of Norwegian whaling, told the news conference that Norway could resume whaling if experts decide Minke stocks are large enough.