At last month’s annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, Chairman Will Hogarth–a former US Fisheries official–said that repealing the 23-year-old international whaling moratorium may actually protect whale populations. Hogarth’s surprising statement drew the ire of the large anti-whaling contingency among the 84 member nations as well as environmental groups like Greenpeace who see the 1986 whaling ban as a major symbol of global conservation efforts.

Hogarth told BBC News, “I’ll probably get in trouble for making this statement, but I am probably convinced right now that there would be less whales killed if we didn’t have the commercial moratorium”

Earlier this year, Hogarth said that the US was dedicated to upholding the ban, which pro-whaling states like Japan and Iceland strongly oppose. Claiming that whaling was a cultural right rather than a commercial venture, whaling nations blocked an agreement at last month’s conference that would have prevented Greenland’s Inuit population–who are allowed to kill whales for consumption–from hunting humpback whales off its coasts. Although Greenland, Iceland and Japan have been unresponsive to pleas from the international community to stop the whale hunt, they say that repealing the whaling ban may help move sensitive negotiations along.

Hogarth sees science-motivated whaling as a more serious threat. Japan currently kills 1,000 whales each year for scientific research under a clause in the 1986 moratorium that allows all countries to retrieve as many whales as they want as long as the deaths fuel scientific discovery. Allowing an unlimited number of whales to be killed for research, Hogarth said, has pushed scientists towards unsustainable hunting practices that yield larger sample sizes.

Despite his vocal support for a repeal of the moratorium, Hogarth remains dedicated to minimizing whaling globally. While Tokyo may be happy to hear that Hogarth is in favor of allowing small-scale coastal hunts, he says that the anti-whaling community must ramp up efforts to end massive commercial hunts and curb the international demand for whale meat–an issue that takes center stage in the upcoming documentary “The Cove.”

Representatives from Greenpeace entirely reject Hogarth’s suggestions, saying that lifting the moratorium would set conservation efforts back 30 years. Although Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund agree that research-motivated whale hunts should be regulated, they say that a lift on the whaling ban would further endanger the global whale population.

“Before the moratorium, under the IWC’s guidance and supervision, populations were driven down to commercial extinction one after the other and heavily depleted,” Greenpeace representative John Frizzell told the BBC. “The moratorium is the only management procedure that has even halfway worked, and to talk about scrapping it is going back to the old days.”