Source : the age
Kristján Loftsson is the last Icelandic whaler, a businessman with a piratical air whose uncle died on a cargo ship torpedoed by a U-boat in the frigid oceans between Greenland and Canada during World War II and who, as a young man, served as a lookout on his father’s first whaling boat.
Today at 83, he has made a fortune from the whaling outfit he inherited – and the sprawling investment and fishery businesses he built from it – yet is famous as the defiant face of an industry that refuses to die. This weekend, the International Whaling Commission will hold its biannual meeting in Hobart, while in Iceland there are political moves afoot to finally shut down Loftsson’s whaling operation, Hvalur.
Loftsson normally attends IWC meetings and maintains a quiet presence as an observer, says Sharon Livermore, the marine program director with the International Fund for Nature, just as he normally avoids media attention.
This year, Loftsson has pulled out of the meeting at the last moment, and is dispatching his son, Loftur Kristjánsson, in his place, but he seems happy enough to speak with this masthead as the meeting approaches.
The thought of his son turning up at the IWC clearly tickles him.
According to Loftsson, opponents of whaling – whom he refers to collectively “the anti’s” – have taken to speculating that Icelandic whaling will end when he retires. His son’s appearance in Hobart, he says, will signal that it will not. At least not if he can help it.
In conversation with Loftsson, it can be hard to tell if he is speaking with intent or for effect. At one point he says he is considering applying for carbon credits for all the whales he has killed over the years, given the extra carbon dioxide they would have exhaled had they been allowed to live full lives.
As Loftsson sees it, there is no moral or ethical difference between killing, say, a cow, a kangaroo or a whale for human consumption, so long as their populations are healthy and the slaughter humane. Indeed, he seems baffled that Australia does not hunt its own whales.
“You have 40,000 humpback whales on the east coast, and you have 40,000 of different stock on the west coast. What are you going to do with these whales? Just let them swim there forever?”
“What are you going to do with these whales? Just let them swim there forever?”
Kristján Loftsson
Loftsson speaks from some experience. He attended the 29th meeting of the IWC in Canberra in 1977, and afterwards flew to Western Australia to join a sperm whale hunt from Albany. He recalls being impressed by the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company’s use of aircraft to spot whales. A year later the business closed, marking the end of whaling in Australia. Since then, while humpback populations enjoyed a spectacular recovery, the bounce-back of southern right whales stalled at about 3500, and sperm whales have never recovered at all.
Today, Hvalur – which means simply “whale” in Icelandic – still runs two whaling vessels after Sea Shepherd activists sank two others in a sabotage attack in port in 1986. This year, those vessels took 93 fin whales, out of a quota assigned by the Icelandic government of 150. Fin whales are the second-largest animals on earth after the blue whale, and it is estimated that since the international moratorium on whaling the North Atlantic population of the animal has recovered from about 15,000 before the global whaling moratorium to between 30,000 and 40,000.
Loftsson claims this year’s take was low due to poor weather. Captain Paul Watson, who founded the Sea Shepherd environmental direct action group in 1977 only to split with it in 2022, claims it was low due to his new foundation’s harassment efforts on the open ocean.
Either way, Hvalur has so far been unable to sell the whale meat it harvested this season, which begins in July and ends in late September. According to Livermore, this is because beyond a tiny trade in selling whale meat to restaurants for tourists in Iceland, there is simply very little market for the product.
Loftsson counters that he has been unable to sell the meat because Japan, to which he once exported, subsidises its own industry so heavily, a practice he describes as “discrimination”. Whatever the cause, it leaves him with about 1000 tonnes of whale meat sitting in cold storage. No matter, says Loftsson. He has a plan to turn the meat into iron supplement tablets for “pregnant women and women of childbearing age”, who he reckons would far prefer to eat tablets made of natural whale rather than synthetically produced ones.
He says he can have machinery in place to make them by next season, though he can’t yet say how many he’d make with his 1000 tonnes of stored whale. Australia could secure its own supply by taking just 200 of its humpbacks a year, he has calculated.
As he keeps a weather eye on international efforts to end whaling, Loftsson is also facing increased pressure at home. His existing five-year licence to continue whaling was put in place by an outgoing conservative government in 2024. Iceland’s current centre/centre-left ruling coalition plans to introduce a bill to parliament in February that would end whaling, leaving Norway and Japan isolated as the only countries still conducting a commercial hunt in the face of the international moratorium.
This comes after the same government commissioned a report that found the explosive-tipped harpoons used by Hvalur could leave whales fighting for their lives for up to two hours, and polls show support for the hunt falling. (Loftsson says the whales that Hvalur takes die in under three minutes.)
Whether or not Loftsson – or his son – remain silent at the Hobart meeting, its practices will be central to parts of the conference. According to Livermore, the actions of Iceland at the meeting and over the coming months could mark a historical turning point, and she expects the meeting to highlight the growth of whale-watching tourism in Iceland. It will also consider a call to reduce shipping speeds in migration corridors to reduce the threat of ship strikes.
As to why Loftsson is so determined to continue Hvalur’s whaling operations given its vast income from banking and fisheries, Livermore says she is baffled.
“I think with Kristján Loftsson it is a bit of a one-man mission. I think he wants to assert the rights of himself as an Icelander to access what he would refer to as marine resources, and what we would call sentient beings.
“He’s a billionaire, and he runs his whaling operations at an economic loss. There is no way that the whaling industry could stay afloat without either subsidies or, you know, the support of a billionaire.”
Loftsson insists whaling is an important part of his business and laughs when asked if he is a billionaire. “It depends on how you are counting. Maybe in Icelandic krona,” he says. (There are about 80 krona to the Australian dollar.)
As to why he is determined to keep whaling, he dismisses the question as absurd.
“It is like asking a fisherman why are you fishing? If you have a million Australian dollars in a bank and you have a fishing boat, why don’t you just scrap the fishing boat and spend the money?
“Nobody talks like that, except these people.”
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Nick O’Malley is National Environment and Climate Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is also a senior writer and a former US correspondent.Connect via email.
