Whale hunting banned in Iceland starting from 2024.

The country was one of the last in the world, along with Norway and Japan, to permit this practice.

Iceland, one of the three remaining countries in the world to still engage in whale hunting, plans to eliminate its quotas starting from 2024 due to dwindling demand, announced the Minister of Fisheries on Friday, February 4th.

Fishermen land the first minke whale at Kushiro Fishing Port on the opening day of commercial whaling in Kushiro, Hokkaido Prefecture on July 1, 2019. The history of Japan’s research whaling in the Antarctic Ocean ended as the Japanese government withdrawed from the International Whaling Commission( IWC), and resumed commercial whaling. ( The Yomiuri Shimbun )

“Unless otherwise indicated, there are few reasons to allow whale hunting from 2024,” stated Minister Svandis Svavarsdottir, a member of Iceland’s left-green ecological party in power. “There is little evidence of any economic benefit from continuing this activity,” she emphasized in an article published by the newspaper “Morgunbladid.” Iceland, Norway, and Japan are the only countries in the world that permit whale hunting.

Revised in 2019, Iceland’s quotas currently allow 209 catches annually for the common minke whale, the second-largest marine mammal after the blue whale, and 217 for the minke whale, one of the smallest cetaceans, until the end of 2023.

A struggling sector.

But for the past three years, the two main licensed companies have been at a standstill, and one of them announced in spring 2020 that it would permanently retire its harpoons. Only one whale was harpooned in the past three summer seasons, a minke whale in 2021. The difficult competition with Japan is to blame – Japan being the main market for whale meat – where commercial whaling resumed in 2019 after Tokyo withdrew from the International Whaling Commission.

In 2018, the last summer of whale hunting in Icelandic waters, 146 common minke whales and six minke whales were harpooned.

Commercial whaling was banned in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), but Iceland, which opposed this moratorium, resumed it in 2003. Only blue whale hunting, also banned by the commission, remains prohibited in Iceland.