The poachers await Cites' vote

There are 12 species of great whale, and the hunters want to kill two of them, the minke and the grey whale.

The greys, which undertake an annual 20,000-kilometre annual migration between Mexico and the Arctic, number about 22,000 - probably enough for a limited catch.

There are thought to be more than a million minkes, far more than the minimum number required to allow a sustainable catch rate.

But many of the 10 other great whale species have barely begun to recover from the centuries of commercial slaughter. Some may never do so.

And it would be all too easy for unscrupulous governments, or freelance pirate whaling fleets, to hunt these species as well.

Easy to confuse

It is possible to distinguish between the meat of different whale species by using DNA analysis. Japan and Norway plan to do so.

But not many customs posts around the world have the equipment or the expertise to analyse a consignment of whalemeat and decide whether it is from the abundant minkes or the very rare and endangered blue whales.

There are similar arguments to support maintaining the ban on ivory sales from African elephants, imposed by Cites in 1989.

Poaching reduced the continent's elephants drastically. From an estimated 1,300,000 animals at the beginning of the 1970s, fewer than half that number survived 15 years later.

Future generations are threatened

Yet although Africa as a whole has lost huge numbers of animals, in some of the states wanting the ban lifted there are now too many elephants - too many for their own good and for the health of their habitat.

But if Cites allows sales of ivory - even from animals which have died naturally - it will be all too easy for the poachers to take aim again, confident they will be able to camouflage illegal tusks among those with official approval.

There are many more arguments on both sides. The conservationists say killing whales is an imprecise, hit-and-miss and often cruel business, which should be banned outright.

Paying their way

The whalers and the ivory traders argue that they want to make sustainable use of natural resources, using the proceeds to support human communities and protect the natural world.

Science, they say, supports them, with the conservationists forced to rely on sentiment alone.

The only species likely to survive in this crowded world are those which can prove their economic worth, so that we value them enough to conserve them.

In the short term, then, ending the whale and elephant bans should be good news for both species.

The snag is that those who stand to make the biggest profits from seeing the bans ended have the least interest in conservation.