But Monica Medina, the No. 2 official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the American delegate to the whaling body, said that Mr. Ramage and other critics were demanding a complete halt to whaling, an impossible goal, at least today.

“We can’t stop it; we can only try to control it,” Ms. Medina said in an interview.

“If we can prevent thousands of whales from being hunted and killed, that’s a real conservation benefit. This proposal would not only help whales, we hope, but also introduce rigorous oversight, halt the illegal trade in whale meat and bring respect for international law back to the I.W.C.,” she added. “Are we there yet? We’re not, and we have hard negotiations to go yet.”

Despite a 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling, the numbers of whales killed annually has been rising steadily, to nearly 1,700 last year from 300 in 1990, as the three whaling nations have either opted out of the treaty or claimed to be taking whales only for legitimate scientific study. Most of the meat from the slaughtered whales is consumed in those three countries, although there appears to be a growing international black market in whale products.

Some officials warn that if this effort at compromise fails, the commission’s efforts to police whale hunting, long crippled by irreconcilable political divisions, will collapse.

“The I.W.C. is a mess. It’s a dysfunctional international organization,” said Sir Geoffrey Palmer, a former prime minister of New Zealand and chairman of the I.W.C. group trying to negotiate a deal. “I think this is probably the last chance the I.W.C. has to cure itself.”

Representatives to the whaling commission from more than a dozen nations — including the three whaling countries and New Zealand, Australia, Chile and other nations backing the compromise proposal — are in Washington this week to negotiate terms of the agreement, which would protect as many as 5,000 whales from hunting over the next decade, officials said. They said they hoped that the reduced hunt would give whale stocks time to recover and give negotiators time to write a new treaty that would bring an effective international ban on all commercial whaling.