The warning from Japan, which hunts whales using a loophole in the ban, has come despite a key pro-whaling victory at last year's IWC meeting in the Caribbean nation of St Kitts and Nevis.

At that meeting, whaling nations won their first vote in two decades with a narrow 33-32 majority approving a symbolic resolution branding the hunting moratorium "no longer necessary."

To prepare for this year's gathering, the Asian giant invited IWC members to a conference in Tokyo in February for talks aimed at "normalizing" the confrontational meetings.

But nearly all anti-whaling nations boycotted the Tokyo conference, seeing it as a ploy by Japan to rally support among allies, most of them developing countries.

As it wrapped up the February meeting, which called for secret balloting at the IWC, Japan said it did not rule out leaving the group unless the divided group allowed whaling within several years.

"The big question is whether this will be the last IWC meeting," said Eugene Lapointe, president of IWMC World Conservation Trust, a group that supports sustainable hunting.

"It is time for whaling countries to leave the IWC and set up a new body that will properly regulate whale catches based on scientific assessments of stocks," he said.

"The IWC has proven to be a flawed conservation model," said Lapointe, who wants the group to follow its original mandate of regulating whale stocks.

Although Japan is unlikely to win the three-quarters majority needed to lift the hunting moratorium, environmentalists fear that pro-whaling nations could make further gains this year if they can muster simple majority votes on key issues.

"The Anchorage meeting is a critical one because we could see for the first time in 20 years a clear majority for whaling," said Patrick Ramage, communications director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

"We are hopeful that we will maintain and perhaps even increase votes for conservation, but it's very difficult to call right now," he said.

Norway and Iceland are the only nations to conduct outright commercial whaling in defiance of the 1986 global moratorium.

Japan, which says whaling is part of its culture, kills more than 1,000 whales a year using a loophole that allows hunting for scientific research.

With a simple majority vote, pro-whaling groups could force secret balloting, eliminate a conservation panel and redirect the scientific committee to only study hunting quotas and stop environmental work, said Kitty Block, director of treaty law at Humane Society International.

"Japan possibly has the upper hand," Block said. "So it remains to be seen what they will do with it."

"It's quite dangerous what you could do with a simple majority," she said. "You can't lift the moratorium, but you could strip the IWC of its conservation mandate."

In the meantime, the science panel, whose deliberations are kept secret until it issues its report for the annual meeting, is expected to review a proposal by Japan to allow some commercial coastal whaling, Ramage said.

Japan has said it will again ask to let fishermen of four Japanese coastal towns catch an unspecified number of minke whales under the same IWC rule that permits indigenous people in Alaska, Siberia and Greenland to hunt whales.

The IWC has never approved Japan's request for commercial coastal whaling.

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