The two issues are likely to provoke some of the most heated debates at a meeting of the body regulating global wildlife trade in Bangkok, with both camps expected to mount vigorous lobbying.

Japan has been pushing hard for backing from some of the 166 signatories of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) for its plan to ease the total trade ban on some minke whale populations.

But conservationists have vowed to block the plan, which they say is a concerted push to encourage an end to the 18-year commercial whale hunting ban after previous attempts at CITES meetings.

The current ban was imposed by the International Whaling Commissionin 1986 but Japan says it hopes a vote in its favour at the CITES conference would bolster its case to revive the industry.

Its delegation has vowed "never" to give up a campaign it says affects a 1,000-year Japanese whaling tradition, but environmental groups say any change to CITES rules will undermine the authority of the IWC.

Japan, which is to hunt some 820 whales next year under its "research" whaling program in a loophole to the 1986 ban, says in its proposal that three northern hemisphere minke stocks are not in danger. There are more than one million minke whale worldwide, according to CITES.

The conservationist International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) challenged Japanese data, which cites surveys that go back to 1995 as "outdated, selective and misleading".

"We don't think they will get two-thirds of the countries they need," said Dr Susan Lieberman of conservation group WWF.

The focus Monday will be on the ivory trade, with Namibia calling for an annual export quota of two tonnes of ivory. Another African nation, Kenya, has proposed a 20-year moratorium on ivory trading.

Namibia also wants to press ahead with a one-off auction of accumulated ivory piles from elephants that died a natural death, only the second since international ivory trade was banned in 1989.

But the ban does little to address Africa's domestic ivory markets.

A continent-wide plan to crack down on the practice which is blamed for the deaths of up to 12,000 elephants a year will also be discussed Monday.

It commits every African nation with a domestic ivory market to strictly control its trade or shut it down completely.

The plan identified the countries with the worst illegal markets as Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti and Nigeria.

Africa is currently home to an estimated 400,000 to 660,000 elephants.

The CITES meeting, which started on October 2 and ends Thursday, has already backed a trade ban for the threatened Irrawaddy dolphin, highly prized by Asian wildlife parks.

The dolphins -- found only in the Asia-Pacific region -- have seen their numbers slump to fewer than 1,000 in the wild from habitat destruction, deaths in fishing nets and capture for public show in aquariums.

Export quotas of beluga caviar have been slashed to try to save dwindling numbers of fish that produce one of the world's most expensive luxury foods and improved trading protection has been agreed for ramin.

Rampant commercial logging has devastated forests of the hardwood, native to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

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