Iceland’s largest commercial whaling company, Hvalur hf., has said it will not hunt any fin whales in the summer of 2025.
In December 2024, Iceland’s government granted Hvalur hf., run by billionaire Kristján Loftsson, a five-year license to hunt 209 fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) each year between 2025 and 2029. Another whaling company, Tjaldtangi ehf., was granted licenses to hunt 217 minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) annually over the same period.
Hvalur hf. exports almost all of its whale meat to Japan. However Loftsson, the company’s CEO, told Icelandic media Morgunblaðið on April 12 that the price of their product in Japan has recently been “unfavorable and is worsening.” The low price, driven by economic circumstances, including global trade wars, doesn’t make whaling commercially viable this summer, he added.
“The market for Icelandic fin whale meat in Japan has been struggling for years — there is both a declining demand and a large stockpile of surplus of imported meat that remains unsold — so a lack of market in Japan is nothing new,” Sharon Livermore, director of marine conservation at U.S.-based advocacy group International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), told Mongabay by email. “It’s clear that killing hundreds of whales a year is an economic and environmental loser.”
However, Vilhjálmur Birgisson, chair of Verkalýðsfélag Akraness, a labor union based in Akranes, a fishing town in western Iceland, told Morgunblaðið that Hvalur’s decision to cancel whaling this summer “is a big blow” to his members and the local community.
Iceland, Japan and Norway are the only three countries that still permit commercial whaling despite a 1986 moratorium by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). From 2019-2021, though, there was no commercial hunting of fin whales in Iceland.
While Hvalur resumed whaling in 2022, in February of that year, Iceland’s then-minister of food, agriculture and fisheries wrote in Morgunblaðið that there wasn’t any economic advantage to whaling given the drastic reduction in demand for Icelandic whale meat in Japan ever since Japan resumed commercial whaling in 2019.
In June 2023, the same minister suspended Hvalur’s whaling operations after a 2022 report by Iceland’s Food and Veterinary Authority found that many whales captured during the whaling season suffered tremendously after being harpooned. The ban was lifted in September, and over the next few weeks Hvalur went on to kill 24 fin whales, which are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, Mongabay previously reported.
“The news that Hvalur hf. will not hunt fin whales this summer could signal the beginning of the end for whaling in the country,” U.K.-based NGO Whale and Dolphin Conservation said in an emailed statement to Mongabay.
Livermore, however, cautioned that “minke whales are still in the sights of whalers,” adding that fin and minke whales “offer so much more to the marine environment and to sustainable whale watching than they do on a dinner plate.”
Banner image of a fin whale by Aqqa Rosing-Asvid via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
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