The Environment Protection Minister, Peter Garrett, has admonished global environmental powerhouses Greenpeace and WWF for weakening their stance over whaling.

The green giants joined the private US Pew Environment Group to set out potential elements for a deal at the International Whaling Commission meeting in Agadir, Morocco.

The trio flatly opposed any Southern Ocean whaling, but set out principles for the hunt elsewhere, including tightly regulated catch limits, no trade, or killing of threatened species.

The move by Greenpeace in particular, with its history of total opposition to commercial whaling, drew criticism from other anti-whaling NGOs in Agadir, which are strongly opposed to the deal.

This week the trio were forced to make a clarifying statement in which they called proposed quotas "temporary exceptions" and said that, despite offering compromise principles, they fully supported the IWC's moratorium on commercial whaling.