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India so badly needs; the coastal fishermen of Malaysia have fought bitterly 
the building of a Malaysian trawl fishery; etc. The old and inefficient fights 
steadily around the world against the new and efficient. 
On the international scene another sort of shift has been taking place on a 
national, instead of a fishermen level. At the time of the 1958 Law of the Sea 
Conference the fisheries jurisdiction issue was rather clear cut between the indus- 
trialized countries who were the strong fishing countries, and the developing 
countries who were the coastal fishermen traditional inshore type disliking dis- 
tant water fishermen. In the ensuing decade this particular dichotomy had become 
less clear because of the number of developing countries which with various kinds 
of assistance and drives are becoming rather strong fishing countries (such as 
Ghana, Cuba, Chile, Roumania, Senegal, Poland, Thailand, Kuwait, South Korea, 
Taiwan) with increasing distant water fleets, while a good many of the indus- 
trialized “fishing” countries of 1958 (United Kingdom, West Germany, France, 
United States, Canada) really have not been improving their fishery posture much. 
Another force of a natioual nature bearing on these jurisdictional questions is 
the national purposes for which nation states protect and seek to extend their 
sea fisheries. A decade ago these discussions were put in the framework of pre- 
venting the fishing countries from killing off the resources of the sea and depriv- 
ing developing countries of food resources they would need in the future. In 
general this type of argument has new been subordinated to another—the desire 
of nations to protect their foreign exchange balance by harvesting the commonly 
owned resources of the high seas. It is conceived that this can be done by catching 
fish and shellfish by their own vessels and fishermen within their own currency 
area so as to avoid paying out currency to buy animal protein for the nation’s 
nourishment, or to earn foreign currency by exporting catches so made to hard 
currency countries. This would appear to be a dominant drive among nation 
states currently in fishery development, and it leads often to non-economic prac- 
tices of subsidies, control of international trade, and interaction over fishery 
jurisdictional problems on the high seas that are complex and confusing. 
Although the jurisdictional framework for the management of the use cf the 
living resources of the sea is as stated above, it is a fragile structure. There are 
strong forces on the one hand who desire, for a variety of reasons, to fully inter- 
nationalize all high seas resources and turn their control and management Over 
to a United States agency: there are strong forces on the other side equally 
pressing for an extension outward of the seaward boundaries of national juris- 
diction so that the ocean becomes, for this purpose, a series of national lakes. 
From the standpoint of United States policy with respect to its fisheries it is 
desirable to look a litthe more closely at current concepts of management for the 
use of common property wild fish stocks in the high seas and domestic concepts 
of the use of common property fishing resources in the United States. 
C. Concepts of management for the use of common property wild fish stocks in 
the high seas 
Having in mind the natural and juridical factors noted above the questions 
arise: 
(1) What should be maximized in the management of common property 
marine living resources ; and 
(2) What will the sovereign joint owners agree to maximize. 
The two questions are important because maximizing the physical yield (max- 
imum sustainable yield) from any resource can be demonstrated to be possible 
at a different population level at which the maximum net economic yield can be 
made. It can also be demonstrated that the two objectives are mutually exclusive 
(although the population levels corresponding to both may be within the probable 
error range of each other because of the sizeable probable error usually attach- 
ing to both parameters). Also it can usually be demonstrated that at the popu- 
lation level corresponding to maximum sustainable physical yield from any 
particular resource the net economic yield is at. or near, zero. and that the 
population level corresponding to maximum net economic yield is always at 
ant a little higher than that corresponding to the maximum sustainable physical, 
vield. : 
Arguments surrounding the choice between these two conservation objectives 
have gone forward in the fishery science profession for forty years. and have 
been propounded vigorously by professional economists, especially during the 
post fifteen vears. It is not very hard to demonstrate that when fishine pressure 
on a particular resource nears the point of maximum sustainable yield the sen- 
sible thing to do is limit it to that level corresponding to the maximum net 
