While Japan spent most of last week's annual whaling conference defending plans to increase its catch, Seoul was quietly planning to build a whale meat processing factory.
Environmentalists fear the plant will be used to process an increased harvest of whales.
South Korea has no whaling fleet, but data from last week's International Whaling Commission meeting in Ulsan show that fishermen accidentally caught 84 whales in 2003, compared with just one in Australia, two in Britain and six in the US. Only Japan, with a by-catch of 112, caught more whales.
Greenpeace calls Seoul's catch 'commercial whaling in all but name'.
'Now that the world media are gone, the Korean government may backtrack and build a whale-processing factory,' said Jim Wickens, who led Greenpeace International's presence at the Ulsan meeting. The centre of South Korea's commercial whaling fleet, until an international ban on whaling in 1986, was Jangseungpo.
This month a new US$5.5 million whale museum opened there and the complex includes plans for a whale research centre and whale-meat processing plant, where by-catch carcasses could be processed in a sanitary manner.