December 3, 1973
Page 39145
THIRD LAW OF THE SEA CONFERENCE
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the third Law of the Sea Conference opens today in New York with 148 nations participating – twice as many as at the earlier Geneva conferences of 1958 and 1960.
The goal of this conference is an ambitious one – to lay down in a single international treaty the laws necessary to regulate all ocean space.
As ocean users have multiplied, the classical political question of "who gets what" has been thrust to the center of the debate over the future of the oceans. With wise answers to this question, international cooperation and justice can prevail in the ocean. With shortsighted answers, 70 percent of the Earth's surface could become an arena for serious international tension and conflict. The conference may be a last opportunity for an international solution to the problem of managing the oceans and exploiting their resources.
The conference must address itself to five basic groups of issues – the deep seabed, the territorial sea, the right of free passage, the issue of economic zones, and international pollution standards.
These are difficult issues, reflecting differing conceptions of national and international interests, and they will surely test the skills of the negotiators. Agreement must be reached – and quickly – for the problems of the oceans are too pressing to be put aside. This conference must establish laws to protect the freedom of the high seas beyond a 12-mile territorial sea, for navigation, communication, and scientific research; establish an international regime to regulate the development of the deep seabed mineral resources; reach new international understandings to protect the marine environment; and conclude an international agreement to conserve the world's fisheries resources.
Rapid progress on these issues is not a utopian hope. It is an imperative of prudent diplomacy, and the conference will hopefully mark the opening of a new political process for working together on shared ocean problems.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that two articles on the Law of the Sea Conference be printed in the RECORD, one from yesterday's Washington Post and the other from today's New York Times.
There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
WHO OWNS SEABED RICHES? U.N. PARLEY HOPES TO HARNESS RUSH FOR MINERALS
(By Anthony Astrachan)
UNITED NATIONS, December 1.– The third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea is scheduled to open here Monday despite little preliminary agreement on how to regulate the exploitation of trillions of dollars worth of seabed minerals and ocean fish.
After three years of slow progress in preparatory meetings, the conference will try to write a treaty encompassing natural resources, naval and commercial shipping, scientific research, marine pollution control and other vital interests.
Only the Soviets and their allies have expressed official misgivings about insufficient preparation. The United States and most nations seem to hope that the conference itself will generate enough momentum to reach agreement before private interests start mining seabed minerals without regard for the rights or needs of the international community.
The December session is to choose officers and a secretariat and set procedure for the conference. Substantive issues will be decided at a 10-week meeting this summer in
Caracas, a last-minute substitute for Santiago after the Chilean coup. There will be a further session in Vienna in 1975 if needed.
One Canadian and three American companies have already invested over $100 million in deep sea mining technology. Howard Hughes has a $60 million boat picking up manganese nodules from the deep Pacific Ocean floor on an experimental basis.
Originally nations appeared to be dividing into two opposing groups over the seabed issues, but the groupings have since become more jumbled.
The rich maritime powers, led by Britain, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States, demanded maximum freedom of navigation for their many ships and maximum freedom of resource exploitation for their advanced technology.
The poor nations wanted an international authority with real power to tax and regulate the exploitation of the seabed beyond national limits. They also wanted the power to participate in the exploitation itself. Under this plan, much of the wealth from the international seabed would be distributed to the poor countries. Some idealists proposed that a share go to the United Nations for peace-keeping and other purposes.
But the poor states with coastlines soon decided that they would profit more by asserting control over a wide band of sea and seabed. This would leave less of the high seas and the deep seabed to the international authority, but give the coastal states the right to make deals with multinational corporations or rich countries to exploit the wealth in their newly expanded waters. There would be more income for the coastal states this way than if the wealth were widely shared.
Twenty-nine poor states without coastlines then began to worry that they would lose their claims to seabed wealth. Some, like Zambia, began to worry that their small wealth, dependent on land minerals, would lose value if the same materials were pulled out of the ocean by the ton. In response to these arguments, the Organization of African Unity give the landlocked states a share of fishing wealth in its common position on the law of the sea. Zambia and Uganda are now asking for a share of mineral wealth as well.
The opposing groups are not rigid. Canada is in the same group as the poor coastal states on most issues but agrees with the United States that fish like salmon should be controlled by the countries in whose waters they spawn. The Soviet Union agrees with the United States on most, issues but feels, unlike Washington, that coastal states should not control most kinds of fish.
The success or failure of the conference may depend on a handful of states in each group who see that they can satisfy their own needs by giving some ground to other groups.
The Americans have repeatedly suggested that if the conference does not adopt a position they can live with, and do so by 1975, they will move unilaterally to guarantee the U.S. investments in seabed exploitation that are already being mobilized. The mining industry is lobbying for a bill in the Congress that will do just that.
But Washington is flexible for two reasons. First, all the various U.S. interests – the coastal and distant fishing industries, the oil, mining and shipping industries, the unions, the scientists and pollution control experts, and the military – are so much in conflict with each other that the United States finds it difficult to take a single tough position toward the rest of the world.
Second, U.S. Delegate John R. Stevenson is given credit by many other diplomats for seeing that the United States, like the developing coastal nations, must give a little to get a little.
The substantive issues which all these states must face fall into live basic groups:
THE DEEP SEABED
This is where the real wealth lies, beyond the likely 12-mile extension of territorial waters and 200-mile coastal states economic zone.
Potato-shaped, potato-sized nodules of manganese and other minerals lie on the deep seabed in fantastic quantities. Estimates vary from 90 billion to 1.6 trillion tons in the North Pacific alone.
One industry guess is that the nodules will sell for something like $115 a ton when they can be brought up in quantity. Others estimate the seabed could produce $6.5 billion worth of nodules a year for 100 years.
Leigh S. Ratiner of the U.S. Department of the Interior, a key member of the U.S. delegation to the conference, estimates that if three companies start mining these nodules in this decade at expected rates, they will produce enough nickel to meet about 48 per cent of projected U.S. demand for 1975.
They could produce manganese equal to 12 per cent of projected U.S. demand. The effect on the U.S. balance of payments would be immense, as would the effect on mineral-exporting countries like Chile, Zaire and Zambia.
The United States wants the authority to regulate exploitation of the seabed, with guarantees to protect foreign investment and insure compulsory arbitration of disputes. The authority would collect taxes or royalties from the exploiting companies and channel part of the revenue to developing countries.
Originally the United States suggested that one-half to two-thirds of the revenue should be shared, which could mean billions of dollars in shared revenue each year. But the Americans have backed away from such high estimates as the area of seabed to be left to international control has shrunk. Fernando Zegers of Chile recently estimated the wealth to be shared at only $300 million a year.
TERRITORIAL SEA
There is already considerable agreement on this. The territorial sea, over which coastal states have the same sovereignty they do on land, will extend 12 miles from shore. For centuries it was three miles – the range of a cannon-shot from shore. In recent years, some states have claimed territorial waters as far as 200 miles.
Agreement on a 12-mile limit hangs, however, on two conditions. The maritime states want free transit through straits that will become territorial waters. The developing coastal states want economic control over a much wider band of waters beyond the territorial seas.
FREE PASSAGE
Rich maritime states are concerned that over 100 straits containing international sea lanes will become territorial seas under the 12-mile limit.
Free passage means the coastal states could not interfere irresponsibly with others' ships. The straits states are insisting on "innocent passage," defined in a 1958 convention as shipping not prejudicial to the peace, good order and security of the straits or coastal state.
The problem is that, in each case, the straits state and not the maritime state would decide what is or is not innocent passage. South Yemen could close Bab el Mandeb to Israel-bound shipping, as it has done with Egyptian help, on the pretext that the Israelis threatened Yemeni security.
The United States and the Soviet union are adamant against innocent passage because it requires submarines to surface before passing through straits and prevents military planes from overflying straits.
Agreement on this issue may require a form of payment. The straits states say that at the very least they are entitled to reimbursement for "improvements" to straits in their territorial waters.
The United States opposes tolls imposed by straits or coastal states but might be willing to make payments to an international authority to maintain sea lanes. The maritimes may also concede that free passage through straits requires stricter behavior by the ships than free navigation on the high seas.
ECONOMIC ZONES
The developing coastal states seek the right to control both living and mineral resources beyond territorial waters. There is general agreement that some kind of economic zone should be established but nations disagree on how far it should extend and what kind of powers the coastal states should have in it.
The 200-mile economic zone has the most support. A significant minority favors a zone stretching to the edge of the continental margin, generally defined as 200 meters deep, where that is more than 200 miles from land. Some landlocked states favor a 40-mile limit to leave more ocean wealth for international sharing.
Most coastal states, including those of Africa and South America and countries like Canada and Norway, favor a 200-mile zone giving them exclusive rights to control both the fish in the water and the minerals in the seabed without interfering with navigation, international communication cables and other activities that have traditionally enjoyed freedom in the high seas.
On fishing, there are a number of variations for different kinds of fish, depending on what each country has in its coastal waters and where its ships go for their catch.
The most important difference puts Britain, Japan and the Soviet Union together favoring only minimal rights for coastal states over fishing in the economic zone. They are champion fishers in waters far from home.
The United States, in contrast, favors coastal state control no matter what the size of the zone, even up to 200 miles, except for certain species. This would be subject to international agreement on the balance between conservation needs and the maximum use of fish as food, and on compulsory arbitration of disputes. This would end most of the tuna and cod "wars" of the recent past and may well be the basis for the final agreement on fisheries.
The principal wealth of the seabed in the economic zone is expected to be oil. A. U.N. study estimates that there are 2.272 trillion barrels of oil offshore, most of it within the 200-mile limit. That is 100 to 200 times more than the Alaska oil-field reserves and enough for 140 years at present world consumption rates.
RESEARCH AND POLLUTION
The developing states say they alone should control research and set pollution standards in their waters, including the 200-mile economic zone. The advanced states want maximum freedom for scientific research in the oceans and high international standards to prevent pollution. By implication, they fear that the developing states might use pollution as a pretext to harass shipping to their ports.
The United States says coastal states should have the right to set pollution-control standards higher than the international ones. This could be vitally important when it comes to a country like Canada trying to prevent oil spills from U.S.-bound oil tankers.
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-EIGHT NATIONS JOINING U.N. PARLEY ON LAW OF SEA OPENING TODAY
(By Kathleen Teltsch)
UNITED NATIONS, New York, December 2.– After three years of preparation, the third Law of the Sea Conference opens here tomorrow with 148 governments seeking agreements on managing the earth's waters and exploiting their resources.
The two-week preliminary meeting is to set the guidelines for what United Nations planners call "the most important lawmaking conference ever held."
John R. Stevenson, the head of the United States delegation, also sees the conference as a "last opportunity for some sort of international solution" before the competing interests of governments make the freedom of the high seas a thing of the past.
So complicated are the economic and political problems that the participants already have agreed that a 10-week work session beginning this summer in Venezuela will almost certainly be followed by another in Vienna in 1975.
"If there is a political will to agree, we may have achieved our goal by then," a Frenchman said. Then he shrugged and added, "If not, my grandchildren will see the results – maybe."
Two previous international conferences in 1958 and 1960 produced agreements on navigation, fishing and territorial waters but these have proved unsatisfactory or become outdated.
Participants this time will seek to lay down in a single international treaty laws regulating all ocean space.
At stake economically are minerals worth billions on the deep seabed – manganese and copper, cobalt and nickel. There are the fish and other living resources, which are already being fought over. And in a world short of energy, there is the prospect of increasing exploitation of offshore petroleum and natural gas.
The United States and other big powers have a vital interest in insuring the mobility of their fleets and almost all nations share a concern about shipping since the experts here calculate that 95 per cent of all transported goods moves by water.
Pollution is a growing concern, with ecologists warning that further poisoning of the waters could destroy life in the oceans for all time. There is broad agreement that the conference should establish the need for regulations to protect the marine environment.
The session is to open with the election of officers and Hamilton Shirley Amerasinghe of Sri Lanka, who headed the preparatory committee, is the favorite for the presidency.
A critically important issue is the method of voting. The current General Assembly decided by the gentleman's agreement that there would be no voting on matters of substance at the conference until all efforts to reach agreement by consensus had been exhausted.
This approach was pushed by the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States, which argued that a treaty rammed through by a majority of small countries would not be worth much if the major powers would not accept it. However, it is recognized that the interests of a few countries cannot thwart indefinitely the majority demands and so the conference will have to decide when and how decisions are to be put to a vote.
12-MILE LIMIT PUSHED
On matters of substance, there seems to be growing sentiment for establishing a 12-mile limit to territorial waters.
Some countries, notably Chile, Peru and Ecuador, have announced a 200-mile limit to safeguard their fisheries – a practice that if generally followed could mean that 35 per cent of the ocean would be claimed as national waters.
The 200-mile limit is supported by New England fishing interests, which are eager to keep Soviet and Japanese trawlers away.
The United States has upheld the traditional three-mile limit but has agreed to accept the more generally favored 12-mile limit on condition that unimpeded transit through international straits is guaranteed. The Soviet Union, Britain, France and others take a similar line.
The guarantee is of major concern because a 12-mile limit could close to free traffic such waterways as the Strait of Gibraltar, which is eight miles wide, and the Strait of Malacca,
which Indonesia and Malaysia already claim as their territorial waters. More than 100 similar cases exist.
There appears to be growing support among participants for designating some ocean space beyond the territorial limit, possibly stretching for 200 miles as an "economic zone." The United States has proposed that within this zone, where most petroleum resources are found, the coastal state should have full rights to decide who can drill for oil and full jurisdiction over the resources, although it would share some revenue with the international community.