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| Environmentalists in Seoul have protested South Korea's whaling plans |
South Korea
has said it may reverse a controversial plan to resume whaling for
"scientific research" if other options to study the mammals were
available.
An official
said on Wednesday that the country may consider other ways to study whales
without killing them.
South Korea
had cited scientific research rules last week as a reason to restart whaling.
But critics
say the move was simply commercial whaling in disguise.
"We
may not conduct whaling for scientific research if there is another way to
achieve the goal," said Kang Joon-Suk, a senior official of South Korea's
Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.
He did not
provide further details.
A South
Korea delegation had announced during an International Whaling Commission
meeting in Panama on 4 July that it would hunt whales under regulations
permitting whaling for scientific research.
It said the
research was needed "for the proper assessment of whale stocks".
But this
was met with criticism from governments like the US, Australia and New Zealand,
as well as environmental groups.
South Korea
has had a long tradition of whaling, especially in its Ulsan region, where
fishermen already catch whales in fishing nets.
Officially,
this happens accidentally, but local environment groups say the minkes are
deliberately caught, and that the meat is easily bought in markets and
restaurants, says the BBC's environmental correspondent Richard Black.
An
international moratorium on commercial whaling was imposed in 1986. But
some countries like Japan conduct scientific whaling programmes.
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