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United Nations Development Program, and stopped off in Rome for 
sessions at FAO last week. I must say that amongst international 
servants in these international bureaucracies it is a widespread feel- 
ing, that we cannot move ahead much more rapidly in the effective 
organization of international ocean activities at the UN and special- 
ized agency level until a major nation like the United States 
straightens out its own governmental ocean organization inside. This 
is felt rather broadly in the international community to be a necessity. 
From this international viewpoint, where I and my colleagues work 
in our capacities as independent experts from the scientific commu- 
nity, and not as representatives of the U.S. Government, the policies 
and postures of the U.S. Government appear at times to be almost 
incredible. 
The Department of State has undertaken repeated initiatives 
through the General Assembly and ECOSOC over recent years that 
have had the most profound effect on marine affairs, but the working 
level people in the Federal structure dealing with these problems have 
had the greatest difficulty in even communicating with our delegation 
at the United Nations. 
The United Nations development program, for which the United 
States puts up about 40 percent of the funding, has inaugurated a 
massive, and successful, program of fishery development on a global 
basis, executed by FAQ. FAO policy in the United States is estab- 
lished by an interagency committee dominated by the Department of 
Agriculture, which has little or no interest or expertise in ocean affairs. 
USAID ocean development activity goes on almost oblivious to 
these other activities by which the U.S. attempts to assist the develop- 
ing nations In marine matters. The actions of the IBRD and the re- 
gional banks (Asian, African, and Latin American) now are becom- 
ing important in world fishery development, and seem to be unrelated 
to any U.S. activity in this field. 
The world weather watch and global atmospheric research pro- 
gram of the World Meteorological Organization is beginning to have 
an ever broadening relationship with marine affairs, as it is learned 
that the ocean and atmosphere are really only different parts of one 
interconnected heat engine. Responsibility for WMO affairs in the 
U.S. Government lies with the Environmental Sciences Services 
Administration, ESSA, of the Department of Commerce. 
IMCO, the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization, 
has its U.S. liaison with the Department of Commerce, and this is 
very sparingly related to anything else the U.S. Government does 
in the ocean affairs field, although IMCO itself is beginning to coop- 
erate very nicely with its sister agencies, FAO, UNESCO, WMO, 
WHO, and IAEA, and so forth, in the international field. 
NASCO, in its 1959 report, set out clearly the need for a more unify- 
ing agency in the ocean affairs field of the specialized agencies of the 
United Nations family. It did so again, even more clearly, in its 1967 
report. Every independent advisory group studying this problem since 
has done so, including the International Joint Working Party of 
SCOR/ACMRR/WMO(A.C.) in its “Helio Caballa” report “Inter- 
national Ocean Affairs”. 
The key block to establishing a world oceanic organization has been 
the incoherent state of the organization of ocean affairs in the U.S. 
