The collapse of a meeting seeking international agreement on the future of whaling has come as no surprise to a New Zealand anti-whaling representative monitoring the talks in Morocco.
The International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Agadir went into closed door discussions soon after opening on Monday and it emerged overnight that those discussions between IWC member countries had collapsed.
World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) New Zealand representative Bridget Vercoe said there were so many different stances from the representatives that it was always going to be a tall order to get a compromise.
It means whaling countries Japan, Norway and Iceland remain free to keep hunting whales as they always have, and that Japan could keep heading to the Antarctic to hunt whales for what it has always claimed is "scientific" research.
The proposal brought to the meeting involved lifting a moratorium on whaling for 10 years but imposing controls on the limited whaling that would then be allowed.
Ms Vercoe told NZPA Japan appeared to be willing to make some compromises, but in the end the stances between the countries were too stretched across the spectrum.
She said the New Zealand delegation, led by Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully and delegate Sir Geoffrey Palmer, was focused on ending whaling in the Antarctic whereas WSPA wanted it to apply its stance to the northern hemisphere whaling as well.
Ms Vercoe said the one positive to come out of the meeting was that dialogue between all stakeholders was resumed.
She said the meeting was not over and there was now an issue of Greenland pushing for a resumption of humpback whale hunting on a small scale as part of its indigenous catch allowance. She said indigenous hunting was under the proviso that no catch could be sold commercially, but with Greenland there was evidence of that happening. Indigenous catch allowances for the United States and Denmark also needed to be sorted out.
Sir Geoffrey said the collapse of talks was due to "an absence of political will to bridge the gaps and to compromise", and that the IWC was now on shaky ground.
"I think ultimately if we don't make some changes to this organisation in the next few years it may be very serious, possibly fatal for the organisation -- and the whales will be worse off," he said.
