The vigor with which truly international fishery 

 operations are being developed is indicated by the 

 fact that 20 nations are now fishing off the 

 southwest coast of Africa with modern long range 

 vessels. These include, among others, South Korea, 

 Nationalist China, Israel, Bulgaria, Rumania, 

 Egypt, and Greece. The rapidly developing fish- 

 eries on the Continental Shelf of South America, 

 south of the Rio de la Plata, are shared not only 

 by South American nations but by Cubans, 

 Spanish, Russians, Japanese, and others. There is 

 already serious concern about declines in produc- 

 tivity on the major trawling grounds off the coast 

 of Mauritania and Senegal, where more than 200 

 large, modern, oceangoing trawlers are now operat- 

 ing on a year-round basis. Rumanian vessels are 

 active off the coast of New Zealand, and the 

 Kuwaiti are involved in development of the shrimp 

 fisheries off North Borneo. The pace of this 

 development is such that unless some effective 

 means of developing the necessary scientific 

 knowledge on yield potentials (and an adequate 

 control mechanism to prevent exceeding these 

 limits) is forthcoming, the economic effect of any 

 improvement in technology or markets is likely to 

 be vitiated by over-exploitation of existing stocks, 

 unless the technical breakthroughs that will move 

 us into a new era of wider ocean fishing and 

 further diversification in exploiting shelf species 

 are achieved. 



D. Potential and Present Degree of Utilization by 

 Area 



Few efforts have been made to break down 

 total potential yields by geographic areas, although 

 many have discussed the subject in terms of likely 

 areas for growth potential. Meseck (1962) pre- 

 sented what was then the best and most complete 

 treatment of total yield estimates by geographic 

 areas. On the basis of admittedly insufficient 

 knowledge he suggests potential area yields shown 

 in Table 4. Present production (1965) is shown in 

 the last column. Current developments have al- 

 ready made it clear that these estimates are 

 inadequate, however, and more defensible figures 

 are now in preparation in FAO as a part of the 

 Indicative World Plan. 



Those who have dealt with food chain relation- 

 ships as a means of estimating fish potentials have 

 not partitioned them by geographic areas. As they 

 are devised either from average ocean productivity 



Table 4 



PROJECTED YIELDS BY 1980 AND 



PRESENT PRODUCTION 



(million metric tons) 



Total . 



70 



52.14 



Source: Forecasted production, Meseck (1962); 1965 

 production, FAO Yearbootc, 1966. 



or from integrated values based on varying produc- 

 tivity rates, one might arbitrarily allocate such 

 estimates according to ocean surface areas, as 

 follows: Pacific, 53 per cent; Atlantic, 25 per cent; 

 Indian, 22 per cent. 



The relative degree of utilization of the ocean's 

 fishes in an aggregate sense might be approximated 

 by the ratio of present production to total 

 potential yields estimated by various authors. For 

 those estimates based on catch trends and fishing 

 patterns and limited by present technology, the 

 ratios, as of 1964, would run from approximately 

 25 to 92 per cent utilization. In terms of biological 

 potential, however, the ratio of harvest to total 

 yield potentials ranges from about 3 to 25 per 

 cent. 



It is possible to make some useful general 

 statements about the relative utilization of major 

 groups of marine animals. The demersal fish forms 

 (flounders, soles, cods, redfish), are probably the 

 most fuUy exploited groups in terms of their total 

 potential. The Indicative World Plan Working 

 Group on Marine Resource Appraisal (1966) con- 

 cluded that there are no large demersal fish stocks 

 left unexploited in the Northeastern Atlantic. In 

 view of the rapid expansion of trawl fisheries in 

 the Eastern Pacific and the historically heavily 

 exploited Asian stocks of demersals, one can 

 hardly expect a general increase in production of 

 demersal fish in the Northern Hemisphere. This 



VIH3 



