South Korean environmental activists display a banner during a demonstration denouncing Japan's whaling, in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, 29 May 2007.

Credit: AFP

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska: A Brazilian-led plan to set up a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic Ocean failed Wednesday despite winning a majority vote at the polarized International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Thirty-nine nations were in favor of the proposal while 29 voted against it with three abstentions at the commission's annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

It failed to achieve the mandatory three-quarter majority for key policy reforms at the 75-nation IWC, which manages limited whaling and is in charge of conservation of the large mammals.

Extensive sanctuary

The plan to establish the sanctuary extending from the east coast of South America to the west coast of Africa is also backed by Argentina and South Africa.

The vote Wednesday was the first taken since the four-day annual talks began on Monday. The IWC is nearly equally divided between pro-whaling nations led by Japan, Norway and Iceland, and the anti-whaling group led by the United States, Britain and Australia.

Environment group Greenpeace charged that the sanctuary bid was blocked by governments "who consistently uphold the right to commercially hunt whales, but today denied the rights of other countries to use them for non-lethal purposes or to protect them."

Currently, there are whale sanctuaries in the Antarctic or Southern Ocean, and Indian Ocean.

"Entirely unacceptable"

Wendy Elliott of conservation group WWF International said Japan was conducting whale hunts in the Southern Ocean "under the guise of scientific research while selling the meat in commercial outlets in Japan.

"This is entirely unacceptable," she said. But Elliott highlighted what she called the "positive side of the vote" Wednesday, saying it showed that "the conservation side has a majority again this year and this a positive sign."

"We hope this sends Japan and Norway and their allies a clear message that this commission will not be easily won over," said Leah Garces of the World Society for the Protection of Animals.

Japan last year won a non-binding resolution in favor of commercial whaling, but fell short of the numbers in the commission needed to overturn a two-decade moratorium on such activity.

Greenpeace said that with strong pressure from Latin American countries and conservation minded governments, the South Atlantic whale sanctuary could be agreed at the next IWC meeting in Chile.