Earliler this month, a number of Alaskan environmental and conservation groups filed an administrative appeal to that state's Secretary of Commerce, asking that a draft plan to co-manage Cook Inlet beluga whales be released. The plan is likely to require hunter registration, harvest rules and quotas, and meetings to negotiate the plan have been closed for some time.
Carl Jack, one of two hunters on the Cook Inlet Marine Mammal Council's negotiating team, said the talks with National Marine Fisheries Service are not public meetings and the council has the right to restrict the invitation list. He said that native and federal negotiators have agreed to make the agreement public as soon as it is signed.
Federal fisheries service lawyers are now examining the agreement, and details will probably be released next week. The federal Marine Mammal Protection Act allows the federal regulators to make a cooperative agreement with Alaska Native organizations to provide co-management of subsistence hunting, she said.
Officials for the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Cook Inlet Marine Mammal Council have been working for the past three weeks to have a interim co-management agreement in place before the hunting season begins next month. The negotiations were initiated in mid-March 1999 on a 2-year interim co-management agreement, hoping to conclude the agreement before subsistence hunting begins in May 1999. Such agreements exist between Native hunters and the federal government elsewhere in Alaska.
The effort to forge an agreement has gained urgency because of concern that the Inlet beluga population is declining rapidly. Federal scientists warn that current hunting levels - 78 belugas were killed last year -- could drive the Inlet's familiar white whales to extinction in a decade. The beluga population, estimated at about 350, has declined by almost 50 percent since 1994, according to federal biologists.
Last month, a coalition of conservation groups petitioned the federal government to put the whales on the endangered species list. Such a listing would require NMFS to monitor all human activity in the Inlet, including the oil and gas industry, for the potential effects on the beluga. While the federal government could quickly declare the whale endangered, it lacks authority to stop this year's whale hunt.
Co-management is seen by many as a way to keep the whales from being listed as an endangered species. Jack said the new agreement is a temporary one, to be in effect for two years while both sides focus on a permanent plan.
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