The quota is the same for the third straight year, after the government increased the number of minke whales hunters were allowed to kill by 30 percent to 1,052 the highest level since it resumed commercial whaling in 1993.
Hunters filled only about half the quotas in both 2006 and 2007 because of bad weather. Whalers need almost perfectly calm seas to spot and harpoon minke whales.
Greenpeace suggested, however, that the quotas were higher than the market needed.
"Quotas have rarely been met since Norway resumed whaling in 1993," said Truls Gulowsen, leader of Greenpeace in Norway. "There is no market for whale meat," he said, noting that Iceland stopped whaling in August 2007, citing lack of markets. Norwegians eat the red meat of whales, but the blubber is now dumped because there is no domestic market for the fatty tissue.
Norway angered environmentalists and many countries in 1993 by resuming the hunts in defiance of a 1986 commercial whaling ban imposed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
It has faced protests, boycott threats and even sabotage of fishing trawlers used to harpoon the sea mammals.
Norway is not bound by the IWC ban because of rules that allowed it to object to and opt out of the moratorium. Opponents of the hunt say it violates the spirit of the ban, imposed because some types of whales are endangered by over-hunting.
Norway says the minke the smallest of the baleen whales, at about nine meters (30 feet) are plentiful, and that it sets quotas based on scientific estimates maintaining a sustainable Norwegian minke population, now estimated at 107,000 animals.
"The model that is used to set quotas is conservative," the Norwegian Fisheries Ministry said in a statement. "The quota is within an interval that researchers believe is completely safe when it comes to sustaining the minke whale population we hunt."
Greenpeace says the hunt is a purely political symbol, used to convince small coastal communities that the government takes their economic problems seriously.
"The whaling sector in Norway employs about 100 people per year and is truly a marginal enterprise. In comparison, an average of 800 fishermen have lost their jobs in fisheries every year," Gulowsen said.
