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Subject: Exploitation/Exploration of Seabed, Space
fbaube@NOTE.NSF.GOV (Fred Baube) writes:
:There's not really anything fundamentally wrong or evil about the
:economic development/exploitation regime established by the Law
:of the Sea Treaty ("UNCLOS 3"). And because the legal statuses
:of the Antarctic and outer space are much less well-defined,
:similar criticism about either is premature.
Presumably rational men can disagree about this. I think it sets
a poisonous precedent.
:UNCLOS 3 does not tell private interests they are forbidden to
:exploit the seabed. It's mainly the legalistic aspects of UNCLOS
:3 as a treaty instrument that have kept the US from ratifying it;
:among other things, it seems to leave signatories vulnerable to
:an open-ended amendment process. This hasn't stopped the US from
:taking advantage of transit rights codified by the treaty, but it
:*has* inhibited private parties from leaping into the legal limbo
:of seabed development. It's not a big problem for the US and the
:OECD, because placer deposits and crusts that fall within the US
:EEZ are turning out to be much better economic bets than seabed
:nodules, and the Soviet Union and South Africa have not (yet)
:moved to exploit OECD import vulnerability in manganese, cobalt,
:or any other metal found in marine deposits. Check OTA reports
:for details.
I don't doubt that the US government is pursuing some kind of
cynical, expedient course of action.
:Roughly speaking, an entity (such as a US company) wishing to
:develop a seabed tract is to give its survey results, and a list
:of pairs of tracts, to the "International Seabed Authority"
:(ISA), which gets its choice of the better of each pair of
:tracts, and use on its tract (the ISA's) of the same technology
:available to the company on its (the company's) tract. The
:notion is REJECTED that a monopoly on economical technology shall
:imply a monopoly on exploitation of the "common heritage". How
:*else* can the ISA be expected to exploit a plot and develop a
:distributable surplus value ?
Why must those who develope the technology share it with others?
How else indeed? Like any other "mixed economy" proposition, the
developed countries gain nothing from the situation, except a
fragile guarantee that the third-world savages won't club them
to death for mining the sea.
:The US objects to the treaty's
:tech transfer provisions, but they are objections to the specific
:implementation set forth in the treaty, and not to the principle
:involved.
To the USA's shame, if true.
:UNCLOS 3's seabed provisions are not absolute prohibitions on
:development or developers, they're novel (and as yet untried)
:mechanisms
Try "protection racket".
:to try to ensure that everyone (in the UN) gets a
:piece of the pie. A company is not denied the fruits of its
:developmental abilities, it is denied absolute property rights.
You can say that again.
:Property rights and developmental rights are a creature of gov-
:ernment, and there's no government in the seabed, or Antarctica,
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