ENVIRONMENT: Profit in Watching - Not Hunting - Whales
Daniela Estrada*
"In 1978, I brought 60 passengers to the southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) observation site in the entire spring season. Today I bring 60 in an hour," Argentine entrepreneur Ricardo Orri, a pioneer in whale tourism in the Valdés Peninsula, in the southern province of Chubut, told Tierramérica.
Whale watching from boats and research using photographic identification began to spread across Latin America in 1998. The region's waters are home to 64 whale, dolphin and porpoise species, of the 86 known worldwide.
Most notable are the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), which inhabits Chilean seas, the grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus) and the humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae), in Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, as well as other countries, and the southern right whale, which is found along the coasts of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
Argentina sees the most whale-watching tourists in the region (244,432 in 2006), according to a study by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Global Ocean, and the Whales and Dolphin Conservation Society.
"The region is working on reorganising the activity to make it a high quality and responsible tourism," said Miguel Iñíguez, also of Argentina, one of the authors of the study presented during the 60th meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Jun. 23-27.
Iñíguez said in a conversation with Tierramérica that it is essential to establish legal mechanisms for conserving this marine resource, regulate whale watching operations, educate the communities involved, and carry out scientific research to monitor the species' status.
The study, "The State of Whale Watching in Latin America", says that from 1998 to 2006, the activity increased 11.3 percent in the region, 4.7 times more than the growth of general tourism in the same period.
In the eight years studied, the number of coastal communities participating in whale watching rose from 56 in eight countries to 91 in 18 countries. An estimated 886,000 people took whale watching tours in Latin America in 2006, spending some 278 million dollars. This year the total is expected to top one million people.
After Argentina, the countries drawing the most whale watching tourists are Brazil (228,946), Mexico (169,904) and Costa Rica (105,617). Costa Rica also had the fastest growth rate in the eight years studied (74.5 percent), followed by Chile (19.5 percent), Ecuador (17.8 percent) and Colombia (17.6 percent).
This tourist activity "is providing many benefits to Costa Rica's coastal communities, which had been quite economically depressed because of the overexploitation of fish," Javier Rodríguez Fonseca, the country's scientific commissioner to the IWC, told Tierramérica.
In 2005, the Costa Rican government issued a decree to regulate whale watching, but it is not always respected, he admitted.
"There are people who are really willing to cooperate, and others not so much. Often there is pressure to please the tourist, bringing them too close to the whales," said Rodríguez. Because of this problem there are ongoing training workshops.
The IWC scientific committee expressed concern about using aircraft for whale watching in Chile and Brazil because of the negative effects it could have on the sea mammals.
If they are disturbed too much -- whether from boats or airplanes -- there is the possibility that the whales will change their migration routes.
Bolivia, despite being a landlocked country, in 2006 began tours to see the 'bufeo' (Inia boliviensis), an endemic freshwater dolphin species found in the Mamoré River of the Bolivian Amazon. The first 400 tourists spent 166,000 dollars in the small community that provided the service.
There are 789 whale watching tour operators in the region, with an average of one boat each.
The study's updated figures underscore the growth of whale watching tourism, which should strengthen the conservationist stance of the Latin American countries, versus the hunting rights sought by three IWC nations, IFAW spokesperson Aimee Leslie told Tierramérica.
Founded in 1946 by the signatory countries of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, the IWC agreed 22 years ago on a commercial hunting moratorium for all cetacean species, contravened only by Iceland and Norway, which hunt whales in their territorial waters. In 1987 Japan began its much-questioned "scientific hunting" programme.
In the area of sustainable whale watching, there are already some innovative initiatives. On Jul. 17, when the whale watching season begins in Uruguay, a certification programme will be launched, "Route of the Right Whale", said Rodrigo García, of that country's non-governmental Organisation for Whale Conservation.
The certification is a seal of approval that will be granted to those who comply with good environmental practices, and can be renewed each year. There are 32 candidates to receive it this year, including whale watching tour operators, hotels and restaurants.
"The key is that whale watching is done in a cautious way: that the government always has the authority to ban the practice, and that the providers of the services are more committed to conservation than to their own business," said pioneering operator Ricardo Orri.
(*Daniela Estrada is an IPS correspondent. Originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)