IY) 
Verde Islands, in the Mediterranean, ete. But it is well known that there are 
extensive such deposits on the continental shelf in many parts of the world in 
much shallower waters that are cheaper to get at, and as geological exploration 
goes on there is continuous location of new deposits. The problem is not finding 
oil and gas, it is getting it out of the ground and to market at costs competitive 
with other sources of energy. Practical recovery from the continental shelf is 
now not going on much where the depth of water is greater than 400 feet. Hvery- 
body agrees that to be continental shelf, and within national jurisdiction. Costs 
go up sharply as depth of water increases beyond that, and technology is just as 
hard and actively at work lowering the cost per unit of extraction from tar-sands 
and oil-shales, shipping to market from land sources in the arctic, and in develop- 
ing the generation of competitive energy from nuclear sources, as it is in getting 
petroleum out cheaper from under deeper water (21). 
If there is any one thing illustrated by the deba'tes in the General Assembly on 
this subject over the past couple of years, it is that neither developing nor indus- 
trialized countries (with the possible exception of the United States) have the 
slightest intention of allocating to the United Nations or any other entity any re- 
sources of the seabed which may be inherently its own either under customary 
international law as interpreted by the International Court of Justice, or by in- 
terpretation of the Convention on the Continental Shelf (22). Petroleum deposits 
on continental shelves now appear to be sufficiently more ubiquitous than they did 
in 1958, or even 1967, that the nations which may have workable deposits in 
reasonable depths off shore appear to be more numerous than those who do not. 
Other minerals resources such as diamonds, phosphorite nodules, tin, gold, plat- 
inum, and other heavy metals, as well as practicably extractive sand and gravel, 
all appear to be quite exclusively things of the continental shelf even as nar- 
rowly defined, and therefore subject to national jurisdiction. 
Thus six billion dollars per year revenue for the poor of the world and the sup- 
port of international government free from strings imposed by national govern- 
ments appeared suddenly in the oratory at the United Nations in the fall of 1967, 
but by the spring of 1969 it had disappeared without a shovel being turned or a 
dollar emerging. This is about the length of time required to explode the South 
Sea Bubble of the previous century. Some technologies do not advance as rapidly 
as others. 
5. Increasing the Use of Marine Resources.—It is one of the frequently ad- 
vanced reasons for need to radically revise the governance of the use of the sea 
that the disposal of social surplus in the world between the rich and the poor 
needs to be done in a more equitable manner. No reasonable person doubts the 
validity of that thesis. It has been the prime social and economic problem of 
world society since the cultivation of two-eared wheat began in the Middle East 
perhaps ten thousand years ago. It is only the relevance of the use of marine 
resources to this thesis that is questionable. 
The reason why marine resources are not more used than they are at present 
is primarily because competitive products can be obtained from land sources and 
got to market cheaper. The obverse of that statement is that if marine resources 
are to be used to a greater extent than at present the cost of getting them out of 
the ocean, processing for marketing, and distributing them to market must be 
made cheaper. This applies equally to fish and shellfish, manganese nodules, 
phosphate nodules, petroleum, tin, gold, diamonds and platinum (as well as sand 
and gravel). 
The people (or organizations) who perpetrated the hoax on Ambassador 
Pardo that there would soon be six billion dollars of new revenue available per 
year with which to support the United Nations, or to divide out among the devel- 
oping nations, or to fill other good purposes, could not have been so economically 
naive as to have believed any such nonsense, and their motives are not clear to 
me. By their activity they have damaged the support of much good work by 
United Nations specialized agencies that has been aimed productively at assist- 
ing the developing nations to a greater use of the ocean. I refer to the work of 
the United Nations Development Program, FAO, UNESCO, WMO, ECOSOC, 
ECAFH, IBRD, Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, ete. (23). 
The reason they have damaged this support is that there is a sufficiently strong 
reaction against their fanciful schemes to internationalize the ocean in the name 
of the United Nations or a new international body that these other quite useful, 
and in some cases long standing, activities of the United Nations agencies are 
beginning to be seen in national legislatures (whence originate all funds sup- 
porting the United Nations and its specialized agencies) as a sinister plot by 
internationalists to destroy the foundation of sovereign national government. 
26—563—70—pt. 2 43 
