47 



alone but with all potentially food-deficient countries as well. But if 

 effective means of cooperation in development are not achieved, the 

 ultimate decision will rest inescapably with the leadership of the most 

 productive country, the United States. 



Oceans 



The status of the three-fifths of the globe covered by oceans was in 

 question in the mid-1970s. Squabbles over fishing rights and seaward 

 extent of national sovereignty were frequent. U.S. entrepreneurs 

 impatiently waited for some sort of legal determination of seabed 

 sovereignty and property rights in order to exploit emerging tech- 

 nologies for securing the petroleum and metallic wealth of this remain- 

 ing frontier. Naval use of the international medium of the oceans 

 remained a plausible exercise of national power, but question was 

 being raised as to U.S. supremacy at sea, once taken for granted and 

 now seriously challenged. Environmentalists were vocal in denuncia- 

 tion of Japanese and Soviet overfishing of the dwindling population of 

 whales and of the pollution of the oceans by oil spills and chemical 

 effluents. Failure of the maritime nations to agree on a new law of 

 the sea in pending negotiations threatened to leave the ocean commons 

 in a state of anarchy, instead of leading to a system of cooperation to 

 maximize the management of the oceans as a sustained source of food 

 and mineral wealth. 



Resource Allocation 



Consumption of minerals and fossil fuels is proportional to the 

 level of economic development of nations, and levels of development 

 differ greatly. Production of minerals and fossil fuels is related to their 

 occurrence in the earth, and they are unevenly distributed among 

 nations. Since extractive industries are first to be attempted by 

 developing nations, the effect is that of a flow of materials from the 

 poor countries to the rich, and a flow of processed goods from the 

 rich countries to the poor. Efforts by poor countries to correct these 

 evidently disadvantageous terms of trade have brought controversy 

 into the United Nations and other forums. For all poor countries to 

 reach the levels of materials consumption already achieved by the 

 developed countries would far exceed the available reserves of the 

 earth. Demands by the poor countries for a larger share of the benefits 

 of the wealth from their mines and oil fields signal the need for eventual 

 agreement among nations as to an equitable allocation of these 

 resources. The wealth of developed countries is in the form of tech- 

 nology, management, a built industrial plant, and investment 

 capital. It remains to be determined how much of a transfer of the 

 technical resources of the rich nations to the poor will be acceptable, 

 and how large a share of raw materials the poor nations will insist 

 on retaining. Clearly, the developed nations will need to practice a 

 greater conservation of imported resources and the developing coun- 

 tries will need to moderate their expectations of equaling the con- 

 sumption levels achieved by the rich. There is simply not enough to 

 go around. But by the mid-1970s, these constraints were insufficiently 

 appreciated in either the rich or the poor countries. An attempt to 

 ascertain the limits to growth, though usefully signaling an alert, had 

 foundered on dubious assumptions while neglecting the practical 

 question of how high a standard of consumption was achievable 

 over the entire globe with its inexorably increasing population. 



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