Declining Demand
ICELAND
Iceland will end commercial whaling in 2024 after officials and analysts said the demand for whale meat has dwindled in the past years, Agence France-Presse reported.
Iceland is one of the few countries in the world – including Japan and Norway – where whales are still hunted, despite criticism from animal rights groups and environmentalists.
However, the country’s whalers have barely taken to the sea in the past three years: The demand for whale meat dropped noticeably when Japan – Iceland’s primary market – returned to commercial whaling in 2019 for the first time in more than 30 years.
The island nation has also extended no-fishing coastal zones, which has required whalers to go further offshore and therefore make their hunts costlier.
Fisheries Minister Svandis Svavarsdottir noted that there is “little proof that there is any economic advantage to this activity.”
Meanwhile, whales have become pivotal in Iceland’s flourishing eco-tourism sector.
More than 360,000 whale watchers visited the North Atlantic waters off the coast of Iceland to observe the cetaceans in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic paralyzed the tourism sector.
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