Whale Oil

May Be Controlled by New Convention

A special League of Nations Com mittee of international jurists and ex perts met at Geneva on September 9 and agreed on the final text of a convention for the international con trol of the whaling industry. Most of the nations represented there im mediately appended their signatures.

The object of the convention is to prevent the extinction of whales by wholesale, indiscriminate slaughter, such as has been going on in the Antarctic for some years. Such agreements usually are quite worth less: but if this one should be ob served, it may have an important effect on the coconut planters of the world, as the enormous over-produc tion of whale oil by Norwegian whalers in the Antarctic between 1927 and 1931 was one of the chief factors in bringing down copra to the calam itous prices which were ruling last August.