JAKARTA - As the only country still commercially hunting whales, Iceland said it plans to end the practice by 2024 as demand for whale meat dwindles.
For the past three years, the island nation's whalers have hardly taken their ships into the North Atlantic despite the country's large quota.
"There are several justifications for allowing whaling after 2024", Fisheries Minister Svandís Svavarsdóttir, a member of the Green-Left party, wrote in the newspaper Morgunbladid.
"There is little evidence that there is any economic benefit from this activity."
Demand for Icelandic whale meat has fallen dramatically since Japan — Iceland's main market, especially for fin whale meat — returned to commercial whaling in 2019 after a three-decade hiatus.
The expansion of the no-fishing coastal zone that requires whalers to go further offshore has made hunting Iceland more expensive.
Svavarsdottir's words were echoed by Gísli Vikingsson, a marine biologist and whale specialist at the Icelandic Institute of Marine and Freshwater Research.
"Even if whaling is sustainable from a biological point of view, it may not be socially or economically sustainable, and that's again outside of our field," Vikingsson said.
The number of boats taking part in the hunt also continued to dwindle.
In 2021, 575 whales were speared in Norway, less than half the official quota, by the 14 ships still in service.
To note, Iceland, Norway and Japan are the countries that still allow commercial whaling, despite criticism from animal rights activists and environmentalists, concerns about toxins in meat and a shrinking market.
In Iceland, whales have been the star of a booming ecotourism in recent years.
More than 360,000 whale watchers flocked to the North Atlantic waters off Iceland to admire the majestic creature in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic crippled the tourism sector.
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