OSLO, Norway — Norway's whalers began their hotly protested hunt last month, knowing that blubber — once a prize of their backbreaking and dangerous arctic voyages — is just about worthless to them.
Whale blubber was once a treasure in Norway and used in a wide range of products. Now, uses are few, and the price is so low that hunters say it's hardly worth hauling to land, where 800 tons of the pearly fat are already frozen in northern warehouses from past hunts.
The Norwegian Fish Sales Association lowered the minimum blubber price to less than a penny a pound this year, from 15 cents a pound last year.
"The price is so low, because no one in Norway wants it," said Harald Dahl, sales manager for the association, based in the northern Lofoten Islands, the center of the country's whaling industry.
Norway resumed commercial hunts in 1993 despite a nonbinding global ban, but the government voluntarily prohibited all exports of whale products, fearing that would intensify already negative world opinion. Norwegians eat the red meat of whales but have no taste for the blubber.
Norway, an oil-rich nation of 4.5 million people, is the only country that conducts commercial whale hunts and has faced fierce protests and sanction threats because of them.
In March, Norway's government unsuccessfully pushed for the removal of the minke whales its fishermen hunt from the protected list of the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species so it could permit exports.
The International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986 because some whale types were endangered, and opponents of whaling say Norway shouldn't be harpooning minke whales.
"A resumption of commercial whaling around the world would probably lead to unregulated hunts that earlier drove so many types of whales to the point of extinction," said Frode Pleym of the international environmental group Greenpeace.
Norway is not bound by the Whaling Commission's ban, because its rules allow members to reject its decisions. The Scandinavian nation says minke — the smallest of the baleen whales, at up to 30 feet in length — are plentiful and can sustain a limited harvest.
The commission's scientific panel agrees minke whales are not endangered, with about 100,000 in the seas off Norway and hundreds of thousands more in the Antarctic region.
The Norwegian Fisheries Ministry said no export permits are in the works.
"The whalers just have to be patient," ministry official Johan Williams said.
But the country is prepared. Since 1997, the DNA of all whale meat and blubber has been tested so Norway could document that any exported whale products came from animals legally killed. Only whales taken in 1997 or later would ever be exported, and Dahl said that includes about half the current stockpile of blubber.
This year's quota for Norwegian whalers is 655 animals. Bad weather kept them from filling last year's quota of 753, when they killed 539 whales. The numbers are far below the 1,800 whales Norway took annually in the 1950s and '60s.
About 35 small trawlers are taking part in the May-July hunting season, slipping quietly out of port to avoid the protests, sabotage and high seas confrontations of past years.
Out in the often-stormy northern oceans, it can take days for the calm conditions needed to spot and harpoon a whale. When they do, the animal, which can weight nine tons, is hauled on deck and butchered.
The price of meat — the bulk of the catch — is up 8 percent to $1.37 a pound this year. In the past, blubber was worth as much as the meat, according to the High North Alliance, a pro-whaling group.
Blubber was once used to make oil, lantern fuel, soap, perfume, margarine and other products now made from other materials. Whale bone, now dumped in the ocean, also used to be valuable, being used in such products as combs and umbrella struts.
In 1997, 240 tons of aging whale blubber was burned as fuel, but Norwegians are seeking other uses, such as a health drink, skin creams, waxes and animal feed.
Some whalers have threatened to toss blubber overboard, but Williams, the fisheries ministry official, warns against that.
"They know that if they did, we would pass an immediate ban on dumping it. It is just unacceptable, both in domestic and international terms, to waste such a resource," he said.