The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Panama is about six weeks away, and it's shaping up to be an important and perhaps defining moment.
A recent change of rules means resolutions have to be posted on the organisation's website 60 days before meetings begin, so we have more advance notice of countries' real intentions than formerly.
The Latin American bloc - known as the Buenos Aires Group for these purposes - has lodged a bid to create a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic Ocean.
Japan has set down a motion reserving its right to request a commercial or quasi-commercial hunting quota for minke whales in its coastal waters.
Monaco is looking for the IWC to refer whale protection to the UN; and, as happens every five years, various countries will be seeking to extend subsistence hunting permits for indigenous communities, mainly in the Arctic.
The South Atlantic sanctuary and Japan's coastal whaling bid have both been tabled year after year.
Mutual acceptance of these proposals was one of the main elements of the "peace package" that countries pursued for three years before admitting at the 2010 meeting that minds couldn't quite meet.
But the two main blocs within the IWC don't agree on where the process formally known as the Future of the IWC is now.
When I spoke during the week to Brazil's commissioner to the IWC, Marcos Vinicius Pinta Gama, he described the compromise package as "dead", and I have heard the same thing from several European delegates.
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