Wild West Scramble for Control

Think of it: through the alchemy of imagination, the oceans disappear. Suddenly, the world would gain some 140 million sq. mi. of land, including mountains higher than Everest, volcanoes more powerful than Etna, chasms deeper than the Grand Canyon. By far the most pleasant scenery to man's eye--assuming anyone could survive in a world without water--would be the delicately terraced hills and snug valleys on the gently sloping continental shelves. The rest of the ocean floor would be mostly a vast wasteland of muddy ooze, as bleak in its way as the Sahara.

For the first time in history, man is looking at the oceans that cover two-thirds of the planet's surface in almost this way--as real estate. It is a momentous change, the start of a third great era in man's long relationship with the sustaining seas.

At first they were merely a source of fear, fascination and fish. Then, when the Phoenicians ranged over the Mediterranean in their graceful golahs about 3,300 years ago, the oceans also became a highway over which to carry national power and culture as well as trade. The story of civilization, in fact, is largely the story of bold seafaring peoples that quested for ever-farther shores. Athenians, Romans, Polynesians, Chinese, Iberians, French, English--all saw the ocean as a wilderness and a challenge.

Now the sea frontier seems tamed. The age of exploitation has begun.

Today's technology has unlocked the sea depths, opening a new store of treasures. Oilmen can locate oil, drill and cap wells under the enormous pressures of 700 ft. of water. Mining companies know how to sweep minerals off the cold, abyssal plains 20,000 ft. down.

Fishermen in modern, mechanized trawlers can easily draw bottom fish off the ocean floor with a kind of vacuum cleaner or haul in whole finny schools in a single huge seine net. Industrialized nations, like runners poised in their starting blocks, are awaiting only one thing before the race for the sea resources begins in earnest. They have to know who has legal title to all that wealth.

The answer is being hammered out in, of all places, the mountain city of Caracas, site of the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. Actually, the high and dry location makes a good deal of symbolic sense. The 5,000 delegates and official observers at the conference come from 149 nations--29 of them landlocked states without so much as a saltwater swimming hole.

Virtually every government on earth is represented at Caracas. The only country the U.N. did not invite was Taiwan (so that China would agree to come), and the only one that refused to participate was North Viet Nam (which was peeved because the Viet Cong were not asked to attend). The stated purpose of the Caracas meeting seems unremarkable enough: to update ocean law to accommodate advancing technology. But what has really drawn delegates from all over the world to Caracas is the biggest land (or water) grab in history.

We're in a period like the opening of the American West," says Marine Biologist John Teal at the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution. "Everybody is trampling over everybody else to stake a claim in the oceans." That signals an end to a view that has prevailed for 350 years: the fundamental freedom of the seas. It was first stitched into international law by Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist who wrote in 1609 that the ocean "is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become the possession of anyone." The seas, he concluded, "can be neither seized nor enclosed."

The Caracas conference will lay Grotius to rest without ceremony. In a global game of give-and-take, each delegation has the same goal: to give as little and seize and enclose as much as possible. The scene in Caracas is one of almost Byzantine intrigue. Africans in flowing robes, Chinese in crisp gray tunics, Indians in Nehru jackets, Western diplomats in stern gray suits--all huddle in the maze of meeting rooms, trying to align dreams, schemes and means.

The major issues include:

> How far offshore each coastal nation can extend its absolute sovereignty.

> How far beyond that coastal nations can have exclusive economic jurisdiction--i.e., first rights on living and mineral resources.

> Who owns the resources even farther out, in the high seas.

> Whether an international organization should be created to settle ocean disputes and parcel out dividends from development of the sea's resources.

The conference generally breaks down into two wary camps. On the one side there are the 120 developing countries, ranging in size from China (pop. 800 million) to the South Pacific island state of Nauru (pop. 6,500). They see Caracas as a grand divvying up of the oceans' wealth: a "unique opportunity," as C.R. Pinto of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) puts it, "to augment their meager national resources with none of the unpleasant connotations of 'economic aid.' " They argue that the law Grotius wrote in a maritime era gives an unfair advantage to developed nations in a technological era. Continuation of the status quo, Delegate Makhold Lerotholi of Lesotho protested in Caracas last week, would "mean continuation of a colonial mentality of the most cynical nature." If the developed nations were allowed to exploit the seas at will, he said, they would go on to lay claim to the moon, the stars and the planets.

Lined up on the other side of this emotionally charged debate are a group of 29 modern industrial nations, led (loosely) by the U.S. and the Soviet Union and including the European countries plus Canada, Australia and Japan. French Diplomat Michel Lennuyeaux-Comnene makes no secret of the fact that his country "is hostile to a vote of the majority of developing nations dictating maritime law to the minority of countries technologically capable of exploiting the seas." Other rich-country officials agree, though few care to state their feelings so bluntly. But no one denies that the large maritime nations, which still rule the seas, hold effective veto power on any decisions involving the sea.

Without the full agreement of the U.S., Russia, Britain and Japan, one American delegate concedes, a new law of the sea "won't be worth the paper it is written on."

Given such fundamental Imbalances in national power and purpose, the wonder is that the sea conference is be ing held at all. But the major powers know that the days when they could partition territory among themselves (as they did last century in Africa) are gone; they are too entangled in a web of eco nomic and political agree ments for that, and too dependent on developing nations for raw materials.

Indeed, says Richard N. Gardner, a Columbia Law School professor and adviser to the State Department, "1974 represents a turning point in international relations. The global agenda is now more important than traditional foreign policies. If the law-of-the-sea conference fails, it will harm prospects for other international negotiations on food, population, energy, security, trade. Caracas is a test case for man kind's capacity to deal with global problems in a rational way." Says John R. Stevenson, chief of the U.S. delegation: "We all feel a sense of urgency."

The U.S. and other wealthy nations worry that if progress is not made at Caracas, no new law will come out of a follow-up meeting scheduled for Vienna next year. Without some sort of law, most nations will form bilateral agreements on ocean use, creating a jumble of jurisdictions that could make rational development of ocean resources almost impossible. Or they will make unilateral decisions that could lead to war.

Recent discoveries of offshore oil reserves have already set China against South Viet Nam in the South China Sea, Russia against Japan in the Sea of Okhotsk, and Greece against Turkey in the Aegean (though oil is certainly not the issue in Cyprus). Meanwhile, in all the world's major fisheries, fishermen of various nationalities are wrangling acrimoniously over catches of cod, tuna, salmon, herring, whales. Such quarrels in the past have triggered bitter diplomatic disputes, as in last year's "cod war" between Britain and Iceland and in the earlier "tuna wars" between the U.S. and Peru.

Even oceanographers have been running into unaccustomed political storms. Marine scientists have discovered that the more they reveal about the secrets--and hidden wealth--of the seas, the more they find access to their vast oceanic laboratory being barred by chary governments. Jealously guarding what they believe to be their private offshore Klondikes, more and more coastal nations have been applying the same restrictions on oceanographic studies as they have on offshore fishing. The Brazilians, for example, allow no unauthorized exploration within their 200-mile limit; they do not want outsiders charging around making discoveries that may bring multinational oil or mining firms following in their wake. For similar reasons of pride and pocketbook, India, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen, Kenya and Tanzania have all been discouraging further research expeditions by U.S. and other outside scientists in the Indian Ocean. Back in the 1960s, American research vessels were refused access to foreign waters only once or twice a year; 30 such refusals were reported in 1970-71, and the KEEP OUT signs have been proliferating ever since. American oceanographers worry that such measures might end virtually all Investigations of the continental shelves, the sloping offshore plateaus that are especially rich in minerals and marine life.

The attempt to resolve these problems with a comprehensive new sea law is ambitious, to say the least.

Says U.S. Delegate Leigh Ratiner, "We're really writing a constitution." The Caracas delegates cannot just draw lines on the map the way Pope Alexander VI did when he split world navigation rights between Spain and Portugal in 1493. Rather, they have a three-dimensional task: they must apportion resources (fish, minerals), rights (transit, overflight) and responsibilities (environmental protection, resource conservation) among a host of competing interests. "If you know a good tranquilizer salesman, send him on down," cracks a delegate. "He'll get rich."

The U.S. made the first radical change in the principle of open seas. President Harry S. Truman, worried by World War II's drain on domestic petroleum reserves, declared in 1945 that the nation owned the resources on and under its continental shelf, which extends as much as 700 miles out to sea (off Alaska). He did not claim either the fish in the water or any rights over ship transit. But a few other nations, starting with Chile in 1947, drew no such distinctions and declared that they owned the waters extending for various distances from their coasts. Today, while many countries still abide by the archaic three-mile limit, most do not. Russia, for instance, claims twelve miles; Iceland, 50 miles; South Africa, 100 miles; and others, mainly in Latin America, 200 miles.*

The U.N. tried to deal with this chaos with law-of-the-sea conferences in 1958 and 1960. The net result was even more confusion. The continental shelf was defined, for instance, as the area between the coast and the point where the sea was 650 ft. deep, "or beyond that limit to where the depth of the superadjacent waters admits of exploitation of the natural resources." In other words, a country could keep on claiming offshore waters all the way to the other side of the ocean, if it had the necessary technology.

For a while only the U.S. and the Soviet Union had much interest in the deep seabeds, and only because the ocean floor was an ideal place to hide the electronic paraphernalia of war--special devices, for example, to track each other's submarines. But the 1960s brought a greater awareness of the widening differences between the have and have-not nations and, consequently, a new concern about resources. In 1967 Arvid Pardo, then Malta's Ambassador to the U.N., noted in a rousing speech in the General Assembly that the deep seabeds were littered with minerals, notably commercially valuable manganese nodules. Arguing that the resources were the "common heritage of mankind," he proposed that the profits from mining seabed minerals should be shared among all nations according to need.

Pardo's plan was instantly endorsed by the small states that dominate the U.N.'s General Assembly, and in 1968 they passed a resolution calling for the current conference.

Jacques Yves Cousteau, the famed French underwater pioneer, is aghast at the result. "I'd do anything to torpedo that conference," he says. "Caracas offered a unique opportunity, an opportunity to use the seas as a link between all nations in the interests of peace." Instead, he finds, "the conference is returning to the Middle Ages, to policies of egotistical nationalism, with every country yanking at the bedclothes and the hell with the others. It's tragic."

But it could scarcely be otherwise, given the political and economic realities. Indeed, the seabed makes strange politics; within the general framework of rich v. poor nations at Caracas, new and complicated alliances have appeared. Who would believe a bloc including Switzerland, Bolivia, Afghanistan and Singapore, for example? Yet they have found common cause because they are either landlocked or have extremely narrow continental shelves, and they want a share of the resources of the seas. Nations with broad shelves --among them India, Argentina and Canada--are united in pressing for as big a territorial sea as possible. Archipelagic states like Indonesia and Mauritius want to control not only all the water around their component islands, but also the passage of vessels through straits. The overriding concern of the major maritime powers, which Include Norway and Liberia along with the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain and Japan, is unrestricted freedom of navigation anywhere in the world, including straits.

No nation has more to lose or gain at Caracas than the U.S. It has the world's longest coastline (counting the Aleutian, Hawaiian and Micronesian archipelagoes), the mightiest Navy, the most extensive investment in offshore oil and mining. The rather liberal U.S. oceans policy was the product of a long, twisting tug of war between a number of personalities and interests:

> The Pentagon was quick to see a military threat in the developing countries' persistent claims to jurisdiction over 200 miles of coastal seas. If those claims succeeded, some 115 international straits--including Gibraltar, Dover, Malacca, the entrances to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf--would be controlled by individual countries. That, in turn, would probably end the tradition of unimpeded transit of naval ships.

What especially bothered the military planners was the thought of missile-packing nuclear submarines having to surface in straits; their effectiveness as deterrents depends on secrecy. So the Defense Department insisted in 1968 that the first new laws of the sea be 1) guaranteed freedom of navigation and 2) the narrowest possible territorial seas.

> The oil industry objected almost immediately. Having found rich deposits of oil and natural gas way beyond the three-or even twelve-mile limit, oilmen wanted the new laws to extend national ocean rights out to the edge of the continental shelf. Energy needs, they argued through the Interior Department, should take precedence over defense considerations.

> The State Department came up with a compromise in 1970. Then Under Secretary of State Elliot Richardson proposed that all coastal nations be allowed to extend control of offshore waters to a depth of 650 ft. Seaward from that point, they might develop undersea oil or ore reserves, but only as "trustees" for a so-called seabed authority representing the international community, which would reap up to 50% of the profits from deep-sea exploitation.

> The White House, at Henry Kissinger's urging, endorsed the Richardson plan in mid-1970. "Industry just went bananas," said an Interior official.

Neither oil nor mining companies wanted to become entangled in the international seabed authority, much less give away a big share of their profits. The companies got unexpected assistance when several developing countries suggested that the Richardson proposal somehow disguised U.S. "colonialism."

> The fishing industry soon realized that it had better do some lobbying too.

Far-ranging tuna fishermen wanted narrow territorial limits so that they could fish close to foreign shores; coastal fishermen urged the opposite--wide national zones to exclude foreign competitors.

> The Treasury Department took no interest in the law of the sea until it sent an observer to a U.N. meeting on seabeds in 1973. He reported back, in essence: "You won't believe what's going on. They want to give control over seabed mining to an international monopoly." Treasury Secretary George Shultz and Under Secretary William E. Simon, both fervent believers in free-market competition, were appalled. They ordered an economic review of U.S. policy. Recalls a Treasury official: "We broke rice bowls all over the place."

In the U.S. proposal the seabed authority was broken down to a body that merely licensed deep-sea mining.

Washington's final policy, announced earlier this month at Caracas, neatly satisfies all the domestic dilemmas. The U.S. urges that coastal nations be given 1) a twelve-mile territorial sea, and 2) a 200-mile-wide "economic zone" for exploitation of minerals and fish--all contingent upon free transit of ships through all straits. Nations bordering on the sea would control fish species classified as coastal (cod, haddock) and anadromous (salmon and other varieties that breed in fresh water and spend most of their adult lives in the open seas); they would have first rights to harvest these species and would be allowed to license foreigners to take the rest. Management of wide-ranging oceanic species such as tuna, swordfish and whales would be left to existing (and not always effective) international fishing commissions.

That leaves the really troublesome issue: undersea resources. In the case of oil and natural gas, the problem would be settled relatively simply by the 200-mile economic zone. Virtually all of the accessible oil and gas reserves lie within this zone, leaving coastal states in control of their own offshore deposits. But how to deal with deep-sea minerals?

Some metal-exporting countries --mainly Zaire, Chile and Zambia --want the world to forget about ocean mining altogether. Most other developing nations, however, want the proposed seabed authority to develop the deposits of manganese nodules, and then return 100% of the profits to them. The Soviets have already responded to that idea: "Unacceptable, inequitable and disadvantageous." All the industrial powers, including the U.S., object to the idea that they should make the investments, provide the technology and take the risks for the benefit of the poor countries. Their counterproposal: the international authority should set rules for deep-sea mining, license qualified miners, and collect perhaps 5% of the revenues for the needier nations.

One big issue that the Caracas delegates have chosen mainly to sidestep is pollution. The conference should settle a basic jurisdictional point: whether a coastal nation with strong laws to protect its marine environment--most notably Canada--has a right to bar polluting vessels from its waters. But oil tankers and other ships account for only 10% of the ocean's contaminants. The other 90% of the pollutants come from the land, and that, the conferees decided, is out of their territory.

What will the great sea-law debate finally produce--if not in Caracas, then in Vienna next year? One observer, Ann L. Hollick, executive director of Johns Hopkins University's ocean-policy project, sees three unpromising possibilities.

One is a bland treaty that will merely perpetuate the status quo. Then again, the new law could be too specific for most nations to ratify. Finally, it could end up riddled with vitiating amendments, becoming in effect a collection of multilateral treaties. On the other hand, U.S. Delegate John Norton Moore predicts a worthwhile agreement; most nations understand, he says, "the importance of a treaty to all mankind."

Both may be proven in their ways.

The technological advances that are opening up the sea frontier have caused a legal and political nightmare. But they are also spurring revisions of the gloomier forecasts of the Club of Rome and the other doomsayers about the ability of man to continue to find fuel to burn, food to eat and materials to build with --in peace.

The delegates at Caracas are not fighting over the last loaves. They are trying to set fair ground rules for the sharing of new resources whose abundance is only beginning to be measured. It is this that is forcing a more realistic if not necessarily appealing approach to the oceans. Man is turning to the sea with a surveyor's eye. For the first time, he is compelled to consider the implications of the fact that if all the oceans' volume were divided equally among all the people on earth today, each person would own a watery cube measuring 300 ft. on each side to serve as a storehouse of food, a repository for his wastes, a reserve of resources, a source of recreation and inspiration. To Grotius, it was the sea that "rather possesses the earth than is by it possessed." Not any more.

*The three-mile limit, based on the range of a land cannon, emerged in the 18th century. In World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt mandated a 200-mile "neutrality zone" to safeguard the western flank of Latin America, and that seems to have inspired many of the 200-mile claims being made today. These and other claims generally reflect defense considerations or the extent of important coastal fisheries.

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