AN INTERNET campaign by environmentalists has forced four companies to dump their shares in Japan’s largest whaling fleet.

They are to sever all links with Kyodo Senpaku, which carries out Japan’s annual whale hunt in the Antarctic Southern Ocean, after being targeted by Greenpeace.

Using the internet, the environmental lobby group urged consumers to boycott all products associated with the Japanese companies.

“After only a few months of consumer protest, the fragile commercial interest in whaling has collapsed,” said Shane Rattenbury, leader of Greenpeace’s winter expedition to the Southern Ocean, which harried Japanese ships as they hunted whales. “Whaling is bad for business.”

The campaign had a particularly severe impact on Nissui, an international fishing business with subsidiaries in the US and New Zealand. Greenpeace’s website encouraged visitors to boycott US-based Gortons and Sealord in New Zealand, and to write to their chief executives to protest against their connection with whaling.

According to Greenpeace, Nissui lost contracts in Argentina after activists placed stickers denouncing whaling on Nissui products in supermarkets and sent more than 20,000 e-mails. Yesterday Nissui agreed to relinquish its shares in Kyodo, which will be transferred to publicly owned bodies, including the Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo.

The Japanese Government insisted that whaling would continue, despite the protests. “The transfer of the shares in the whaling firm will not affect our policies at all,” said Hideki Moronuki, of the Japanese Fisheries Agency.

“Rather, we welcome the move. From now on, whaling will be regarded as something backed by all of Japan, not just a particular group in the private sector.”

Whaling is banned under a 20-year old international treaty, but Japan insists that whale numbers have recovered sufficiently to allow what it calls the “sustainable utilisation of whale resources”. Every year at the conference of the International Whaling Commission Japanese officials battle with delegates from anti-whaling countries such as Britain, the US and Australia to try to lift the ban. So far they have always failed.

Japan is allowed a limited quota in the name of “scientific research” to monitor whale numbers and wellbeing. This year the number of whales killed for research will double to around 850.

Environmentalists, and many scientists, say necessary monitoring data can be obtained through non-lethal means, and point out that the slaughtered whales all end up being sold for food.

“When our stockpile runs out, we will stop producing canned whale meat, which is our sole whale-related production and a very small portion of our business,” a spokesman for Nissui said.

“We have no comment on anything related to Greenpeace statements.”

PILING ON THE PRESSURE FOR CHANGE

Apartheid

An international campaign boycotted South African goods during apartheid. The country was excluded from sporting events and foreign companies were encouraged to remove investments. The sanctions contributed to eventual change

Segregation

In 1955 the black American seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white man. She was put on trial. Martin Luther King organised a boycott of the buses. The black civil rights movement in the US had begun

Slavery

A boycott of slave-produced goods, called for by the US National Negro Convention in 1830, eventually contributed to the abolition of slavery worldwide, including in all British colonies in 1834

British rule

In the dying days of the British Raj Mahatma Gandhi urged Indians to avoid British-made goods and British institutions. People wove their own cloth rather than buy imports from Manchester and they collected salt from the sea rather than purchase it from British-run factories

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