Renewable resources in the Pacific
At first blush, it might seem that fish, forest, and fuel problems have little in common. However, they are intricately related in the world's ecological system; a microscosm of their interaction exists in the mangrove swamps, which provide a habitat for aquatic organisms, such as shrimp, and are a source of wood often used for fuel purposes. The mangrove highlights how easily the system can be disturbed: when too much wood is taken from it, the result is the degradation of the marine-life breeding grounds, erosion, or sedimentation. It also demonstrates that indiscriminate explotation of a resource by one sector incurs immediate external costs to another. These policies have already affected patterns of trade and investment in the fisheries and forestry business of the Pacific basin and will continue to do so throughout the 1980s. They raise questions about the economics of harvesting and processing, especially about the comparative advantage of locating canneries, process plants, sawmills, plywood operations, and pulp-and-paper plants in the harvesting rather than consuming countries. Even in the energy sector, there are prospects for new trade patterns in the Pacific region. The switch from reliance on liquid hydrocarbon fuels to coal is already under way. Moreover, as relative prices adjust more and more unconventional fossil fuels will be tapped. Many countries are seeking to replace foreign fules in part with indigenous energy and thereby to reduce their vulverability. Considerations of this sort led to views at the conference that cooperation among Pacific neighbours must be enhanced. On issues such as management of trasnboundary migratory fish stocks; joint ventures between distant-water fishing fleets and coastal nations; foreign investment in forest harvesting and wood processing; access for products of developing countries to developed-country markets; and technology transfer and cooperation at the research frontiers of conservation and utilization in fish, forests
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Texto biblioteca |
| Language: | eng |
| Published: |
Ottawa (Canadá)
1982
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