Fencing the Sea: Resource Zones in Oceania
(Redacted) (1979-04-01). Fencing the Sea: Resource Zones in Oceania (PDF) (Report). Langley, VA: Central Intelligence Agency. p. 17.CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
- Has attachment: File:Z4G3VS5Z.pdf
Abstract: Some 30 island nations and territories in the Central Pacific are establishing 200-mile coastal zones in which they claim control over various marine resources. They began this process after growing weary of waiting for the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, now beginning its sixth year of negotiations, to define their rights to offshore resources. When all the zones are in effect (about half of them are now), they will cover 9 percent of the world's ocean area. 25X1 This redrawing of the map of "Paradise" is revealing some interesting geopolitical features:
• Individual island jurisdictions with small populations are taking control of resources in ocean areas up to 240,000 times the size of their land areas.
• None of the jurisdictions can police its coastal zone.
• Every zone will overlap at least one neighboring zone, several as many as six; many zones cannot be firmly determined until boundary negotiations have taken place.
• US claims to a number of islands in the region conflict with those of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the Cook Island Government. These, too, will have to be resolved before the zones are delimited.
Establishment of the zones does not threaten traditional high-seas freedoms of navigation and overflight, but it will affect the fortunes of five Pacific Ocean powers and a growing number of so-called distant-water fishing nations:
• Australia, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, through their dependencies in Oceania, will retain some control of resources in more than 70 percent of the region.
• Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the traditional distant-water fishing nations, as well as those like the United States and the Soviet Union that want to make up for curtailment of their catches elsewhere, must now secure the permission of the island jurisdictions to fish in their zones.
• The island governments are not likely to institute unacceptable rules for international navigation and overflight in their archipelagos and coastal resource zones because they understand the limitations of their remote physical setting, their lack of enforcement capabilities, and their dependence on international commerce for national survival.
The island states, most with deficit trade balances, all with undeveloped industrial bases and growing populations, are eager to capitalize on the substantial stocks of tuna in their resource zones. Most of the islands are claiming total jurisdiction over all living species—including highly migratory species such as tuna—in their new zones. Lacking both fishery management expertise and the ability to enforce the new zones, they have formed an organization, the Forum Fisheries Agency, to coordinate licensing practices, surveillance and enforcement, and conservation and management.
The United States opposes coastal state jurisdiction over migratory species and, for this reason, has been denied membership in the Forum Fisheries Agency. US tuna fishermen are reluctant to acknowledge the claims of the islands to jurisdiction over the tuna resource for fear of losing the benefits of •the US Fishermen's Protective Act. They are watching helplessly as Japanese fishermen sign agreements with coastal states, despite their country's public policy of international control, and catch tuna.
