Fisheries and the Law of the Sea: A common heritage approach

Abstract

Abstract In essence, the Revised Single Negotiating Text drafted at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea says that, with respect to fishing, coastal-state interests are to prevail for all but the migratory species. Despite the intensifying difficulties in fisheries production, distribution, and conservation, however, the proposals embodied in the Text do not begin to meet the needs for the management of fisheries on a global scale. The 200-mile economic zones in which coastal states would have jurisdiction over fishing would help to create a kind of orderliness, but these zones would fail to meet the problems of achieving efficient production, of obtaining equitable distribution of the benefits from fishing, and of assuring that fisheries operations would be ecologically sound. The economic zone concept fails to meet these problems at their source. The structural character of these problems requires that the old, anarchic principle of the freedom to fish be replaced with a system of positive management. The common heritage principle, formulated primarily in reference to sea-bed resources, could be broadened to provide the needed conceptual foundation. Positive management based on common heritage principles can provide the basis for reconciling private and public values in resource management, whether within or beyond national jurisdictions.