In his book "A Whale for the Killing," first published in 1972, with a slightly revised new edition in 2005, Farley Mowat writes (p. 42 of the Stackpole Books paperback):

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It is true that in 1946 an organization had been formed with the publicly stated intention of giving protection to the threatened species of whales and of regulating the hunt.  This was the International Whaling Commission, whose headquarters were (and remain) in Norway [no; but see below], which also happened to be headquarters for the world's most efficient whale killers.  But despite the employment of many good and dedicated men, the Commission was run for, and by, the whalers; and in such a manner that, instead of helping to preserve and conserve the vanishing whale stocks, it served as a cynical device to divert attention from the truth.  It served to mask the insatiable greed which lay behind the slaughter, by promulgating regulations which apppeared wise and humane but which, in fact, were useless ... and sometimes worse than that.
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Some readers would call that pretty cynical too; and yet it sounds quite credible.  The Wikipedia article by contrast seems to go along nicely with the "diversion of attention from the truth," however:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Whaling_Commis ....

Note that according to that article, the headquarters are no longer in Norway, but in Cambridge, England.  And Norway has in fact withdrawn from the IWC.  In his survey of the history of whaling, Mowat makes much of the Norwegians' especially destructive role.  It was a Norwegian who invented the harpoon gun, for example; and they were the first to deploy whaling fleets, including a processing "mother ship" and very swift small chasers.

As for this meeting in Chile, we may note that the real scientific work that the IWC sponsors, such as studies of the effects of pollution and now global warming on whale populations, happen also to mean a dangerous delay in deciding on revised, improved regulations of whaling.