Ocean Wealth

A few more people around the globe learned, in 1974, that the riches of the sea were neither so boundless as they might have supposed nor so simply available for the taking. The many political, economic, and institutional problems of ocean exploitation were particularly spotlighted at the first substantive session of the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, held mid-year in Caracas. The session adjourned with general agreement limited, for the most part, to a resolution to try to get down to serious decision making in 1975, in Geneva.

To support a priority claim on the oceans' fish (or on the economic rent therefrom), a number of coastal nations have asserted a 200-mile zone of exclusive fishery jurisdiction. There is a good chance that the Law of the Sea Conference may make such a disposition universal, upsetting the time-honored principle of freedom of the seas. But tuna are highly migratory, freely swimming inside and outside the 200-mile zones and occasionally traversing entire oceans. For this reason, the United States and some other nations have proposed to the conference that there be a special treatment for tuna, its use being controlled by international bodies made up of user as well as coastal states.

If there was ever a chance of adopting such a truly international approach, it is being increasingly dimmed by the continuing investment in tuna fishing. If there is to be international agreement, it must be at the expense either of unfulfilled expectations or of a continued depletion of tuna stocks. A third alternative—to concentrate on underutilized varieties—is an unlikely form of compromise, since these varieties are located mostly in the western Pacific and the Indian oceans and are generally deep-swimming fish for which harvesting techniques are not yet very satisfactory.

Thus, expediency continues to triumph over reason. As an example, at the last meeting of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, its members were unable to accept a 1975 quota on yellowfin tuna of less than 175,000 tons, despite warnings by the scientific experts that it should not exceed 130,000 tons. They did agree to a meeting early in March 1975 to review the limit, with the possible option of closing the season early. But this will probably be too late and will merely stimulate tuna fishermen to get their catches as soon as possible. While it is possible that the scientists may be in error the fact that the fishing industries can so easily override their recommendations is reminiscent of the Antarctic whaling agreements and does not augur well for the future fate of the tuna.

In shallower waters, where the cod, pollack, and halibut run, the controversy revolves around just what it means to have exclusive jurisdiction. More precisely, the question is whether exclusivity should mean a reservation of resource for the coastal state beyond its own capacity to exploit. Some have argued that the coastal countries should be entitled to only as much of the maximum sustainable yield of any stock as they have the balance to harvest, and that the balance should, by international agreement, be made available to foreigners. This concept of "full utilization," however, while plausible in theory, runs into a few snarls in practice.

The principal problem is the difficulty of dealing with "incidental catches," where one species is incidentally caught in the nets being used primarily for the harvest of another. Thus, Spaniards seeking cod on Georges Bank take large quantities of haddock, while Japanese seeking pollack in the northeast Pacific take large quantities of halibut. These incidental catches are large enough to have a seriously depleting effect on the stocks, to the detriment of U.S. fishermen, who prefer haddock over cod and halibut over pollack.

In tropical waters the incidental catch problem is compounded, because these warmer waters tend to have far more species, with smaller populations of each, than do the colder waters waters of the upper latitudes. In the South China Sea, for example, dozens of species of fish may be taken in a trawl aimed at shrimp. But there are also other kinds of troubling relationships, such as where man changes the balance between predator and prey, or where the use of one kind of fishing gear conflicts with that of another kind of gear in the same area of ocean space. These kinds of interrelationships are increasing in number and severity as total fishing effort grows and as an increasing number of species are sought after.

Another problem comes from the mobility of fish even within the 200-mile limit. In the United States, our perceptions of this problem are not typical of those of the rest of the world. Our borders on the oceans and on the Gulf of Mexico are so long that a 200-mile limit would give us full control over large numbers of stocks. But in most other ocean regions, coastal borders are short or the countries face narrow seas. For example, even with seaward-extended jurisdictions, numerous stocks of fish would still have to be shared by the countries of northwestern Europe, or those of West Africa, or of the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, or Southeast Asia. In such situations, the extension of jurisdiction will have done little to resolve the problems of achieving effective resource management and equitable distribution.

Problems such as these can no more be resolved by the UN Conference than they have heretofore been resolved by unilateral actions. The conference has the opportunity to facilitate their resolution, however, by agreeing on general principles. The principle of "full utilization," though it has been advanced by many of the North Atlantic states, will probably not contribute to this objective, because of the complexity of the rules and information systems required for its implementation.

The most desirable principles would be those that would facilitate the eventual adoption of economic standards. If the states sharing resources could agree on the common goal of maximizing net economic revenues, they would have a possible yardstick both for determining appropriate yields and for distributing benefits. The use of competitive license fees or royalty payments would be one way of simplifying the allocation process and providing economic efficiency in most instances. Whatever the methods employed, however, any actions which may be taken by the Law of the Sea Conference will be only the first step in a lengthy process of achieving the necessary case-by-case international cooperation.

"Manganese" nodules. Another of the central controversies of the conference involves the so-called "manganese," but actually multi-metal, lumps and pavements, the richest of which lie at the bottom of the deeper parts of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans. In contrast with the "renewable" fisheries resource, which is an international problem because of growing threats of species depletion, it is the apparent long-term inexhaustibility of this "nonrenewable" resource which creates much of the difficulty. Though the nodules do continue to accumulate, through depositional processes which are quite rapid by geologic standards, their apparent inexhaustibility stems not from this but from their physical concentration, their huge volume, and the fact that they have until now remained so far out of reach that man has barely touched them.

It is the deep-ocean location of the most sought-after nodules, in addition to their quantity, that gives rise to the questions demanding international agreement. Located as they are, they are less plausibly subject than are fish to the possible claims of coastal nations and more plausibly identifiable as part of the "common heritage of mankind." Naturally enough, the less developed states of the world, which lack the technological potential for early exploitation, wish to reserve their "common heritage" rights vis-a-vis the industrial states, whose enterprises can mount the requisite effort. A complication is that exploitation of the nodules promises to produce such large quantities of cobalt and possibly manganese as to shatter the markets for the limited number of less developed countries that now serve as leading world suppliers. (The nodules would also yield large quantities of copper and nickel, and cause concern also to the producers of these minerals.) Nonproducer developing countries have so far chosen to throw in their lot with those who seek to control and limit the marine production, partly out of developing country solidarity and partly because they wish to share in the revenues they expect to be generated in the form either of UN royalty collections or the profits of a UN-sponsored nodule-exploitation monopoly.

So far, none of the interested firms seems to have been both willing and able to ante up the full stakes for beginning commercial exploitation in the face of possible future agreements that might effectively limit the return for their efforts. There is also the fact that, despite some optimistic cost-revenue projections, recovery of the nodules and separation of the constituent metals is a new technology, so fraught with commercial hazard that some form of national or international underwriting may ultimately turn out to be a prerequisite to anyone's taking the risk. Time is not on the side of the advocates of international solution, however, since technical data continue to accumulate and national legislators can be goaded into action by the investors of an increasing number of private dollars. One U.S. company has already delivered (November 1974) a "Notice of Discovery and Claim of Exclusive Mining Rights" to the United States and other governments throughout the world. The claimed area lies between Hawaii and Mexico and covers 60,000 square kilometers—an area a little less than the size of Ireland. If the already strained relations between the numerous "poor" nations of the world and the few "rich" ones are not to be exacerbated by a unilateral initiative, some form of agreement at the forthcoming sessions of the Law of the Sea Conference seems almost imperative.

In a certain sense, it might be said that eventual failure of the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea is inevitable. But such a judgment of failure is more likely to be the consequence of false expectations than of the demonstrated inability of the world's nations to cooperate. The conference should properly be considered as only one phase in the long process of transition from untrammelled freedom to exploit a common resource to the allocation of national and international control and jurisdiction. In this sense, the failure or success of the conference should be measured, not in terms of the universality or finality of its agreements, but of the extent to which it will have impeded or facilitated the orderly and judicious exploitation of the sea's wealth, with a minimum of international friction.