Japan’s farms and fisheries minister said yesterday he would skip an International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting next week so as to fight an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease on cattle farms.
“I would like to refrain from attending because we cannot let our guard down over foot-and-mouth disease,” Masahiko Yamada told reporters, adding that he would decide on a replacement envoy later in the day.
The IWC is due to gather from June 21 in Morocco to discuss a controversial plan to legitimize whaling while reducing the overall catch.
Japan hunts whales under a loophole to a 1986 international moratorium that allows killing of the ocean giants for “scientific research,” although it does not hide the fact that the meat is sold in shops and restaurants.
Japan targets culling up to 935 whales in the Antarctic each year, although it was able to catch only about half of that number in its latest hunt because of harassment by militant anti-whaling activists.
Under the IWC draft proposal, Japan, Iceland and Norway would reduce their whale kills over the next decade, subject to tight monitoring, with Japan eventually cutting its Antarctic whale culls by three-quarters.
Japan would be allowed to catch 120 whales a year in its coastal waters.
Yamada took office last week as part of the Cabinet of Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, replacing Hirotaka Akamatsu, who had come under fire for his slow response to the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
Cattle in Japan’s southwestern Miyazaki Prefecture have been hit by the highly contagious virus, which has halted Japanese beef and pork exports and crippled the region’s premium beef industry.
The outbreak, Japan’s first since 2000, was detected in late April and spread quickly, and local authorities have started slaughtering more than 200,000 animals in Miyazaki.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
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Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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