B -3 



Now to try to place the action of the Ninth Consultative 

 Meeting roughly in context, the representatives at the Consul- 

 tative Meeting were operating within the consultative system 

 which was set up under the Antarctic Treaty in which the rep- 

 resentatives of those states enjoying consultative status meet 

 periodically to discuss measures, propose measures, in 

 furtherance of the principles and purposes of the Treaty — 

 and, among other things, to consider measures or agreed rec- 

 ommendations to their governments on the subject, among 

 others, of the preservation and conservation of living re- 

 sources in Antarctica. 



There have been nine such consultative meetings since 

 the Antarctic Treaty entered into force in 1961. 



Among other actions that the consultative parties have 

 recommended to their governments have been the Agreed 

 Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora 

 which have been observed by the treaty parties as interim 

 guidelines pending their entry into force. (We now have 

 legislation pending to bring them fully into force for the 

 United States. ) 



The Consultative Parties also, back in the late '60s, 

 developed interim guidelines for the voluntary regulation 

 of Antarctic pelagic sealing, which eventually led to the 

 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals — which 

 was concluded as a separate international agreement in London 

 in 197-2. 



Much of the work, or much of the ground work, for the 

 actual consultative meeting, recommendations on marine 

 living resources, has been laid by the nongovernmental or- 

 ganization which has served, informally at least, as the 

 scientific arm of the consultative mechanism — that is 

 the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research -- "SCAR" 

 as it is known — which is affilitated with the Inter- 

 national Council of Scientific Unions -- a nongovernmental 

 umbrella organization. 



SCAR was behind much of the work which led to the 

 Agreed Measures and to the Convention for the Conservation 

 of Antarctic Seals. 



And beginning in the late •60s, SCAR's Working Group 

 on Biology, which had addressed many of these issues, 

 began to turn its attention to the question of Antarctic 

 marine living resources, with specific emphasis upon 

 questions of the resources in the Southern Ocean. 



