Fishing quotas that will end in 2024 will not be renewed. Icelandic whaling activity was already almost at a standstill, due to competition from Japanese fishermen.
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It is one of the last three countries to practice whaling, with Norway and especially Japan. But faced with local demand at its lowest, Iceland intends to end it from 2024, the Icelandic Minister of Fisheries announced on Friday 4 February.
The Icelandic quotas, reassessed in 2019, expire in 2024. But for three years, the two main Icelandic companies that hold licenses have been stopped, and one of them has already announced that it will stop this activity in the spring of 2020. a whale has been harpooned during the last three summer fishing seasons, in 2021. The reason: the fact that whale meat is no longer very popular in Iceland and the difficult competition with Japan, the main market for whale meat. whale, where commercial whaling has resumed since 2019 after Tokyo pulled out of the International Whaling Commission.
Commercial whaling was banned in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) but Iceland resumed it in 2003, despite regular criticism from animal and environmental activists. With its economy increasingly oriented towards tourism, the island of 370,000 inhabitants is also counting on the development of whale watching for foreign visitors, who are more attracted by live cetaceans.