Sea studies
An Oceanic Research Council? Donald Watt
Britain depends on the sea for the international trade by which she lives and earns her living. In a world of declining resources she needs to be foremost in the commercial uses of the sea. For her young and middle aged alike the seas are the last abode of adventure, the most enjoyable and accessible area of personal recreation. Over two million small boats are believed to be owned by private citizens, and the number is growing by leaps and bounds every year. The seas are the main remaining sources and are proving inadequate for the increasing population. That this is well understood the world over can be seen in the pressures building up among the Group of Seventy-Seven, the states of the Third World, for a general extension of territorial waters up to two hundred miles, a pressure which may well explode at the third international conference on the law of the sea, due to meet at Santiago next year.
At Greenwich there recently conferred a wide range of experts drawn from govern ment, industry, the navy and coastguard ser vices, the research institutes and the universities. Several groups looked at the problems of ocean science, future technology, com merce and industry and international law and the international relations. Their recommendations focused unanimously on the need for a coherent central organisation. There is no body at present capable of rational analysis and coherent advice to government on the areas in which fundamental research is needed and in which expenditure on technological development would give Britain the best payoff. There is no body to pronounce upon the best way the resources available should be allocated or to bring together the many diverse and scattered research efforts now in progress. There is no body co-ordinating or organising research and teaching in the universities and other places of higher education. Even the millions of small boat users lack a central pressure group to protect and further their interests, the patricians of the Royal Yacht Club being very much divided from the plebs of the sailing dinghy societies and associations. There is no House of Commons back-bencher committee on the sea, though there clearly ought to be. And there is no high level government committee to co-ordinate and bring about a unity of effort between the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Education and Science, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Admiralty, the Department of the Environment, the National Ports Council, the Atomic Energy Authority, the White Fish Authority, the Department of Food and Fisheries, Trinity House, etc., etc.
These are real disadvantages, pointed up by the French creation of a highly centralised powerful Centre, the CNXED, which reports directly to the Prime Minister. At a time when the energy crisis is clearly on us, even if its time-scale is still a matter of argument, Britain needs to be thinking about new forms of dual purpose bulk carriers which can be converted to other purposes as and when the international shipment of oil begins to lose in volume at the end of the 1980s. She needs to be devoting funds to research into the conservation of existing fuel and the development of new sources of energy including nuclear propulsion. With the pressure on the water resources of the south-east and midlands she needs to consider the siting of power stations and the extraction of fresh water from the sea. The pressure on food requires more research into the harvesting and breeding of fish, including shell fish and crustacea, In all of these areas the cost of development and research is high and there is a high risk element, but the pay-off could be very high indeed.
What is needed is an agency or council which can bring together the many scattered and diverse activities now in progress, and provide guidance to industry, government and research institutes alike, to keep full tabs on all oceanic activities, identify areas of overlap and provide full information to all those needing it. It should be capable of analysing British and world requirements. It should have funds to allocate for marine technology up to and including the development of prototypes. It should be able to advise on areas in which international co-operation is needed and areas in which international action is called for. To produce best results it should be funded partly from government sources, partly from industry and it should be independent.
Two other similar bodies would seem to be called for. At the university and higher education level there is clearly need for a
Marine Education and Research Council to bring together the various fields of pure and applied science, technology, engineering, politics and law. It should be prepared to advise on such anomalies as that which prevents public funds being spent on British students attending courses on the law of the oceans (very popular among overseas students of law) at London University. It should have the kind of pay-off the Agriculture and Medical Research Councils have been working towards. Most important, however, is the need for some high level government committee. In the present state of the world with the major powers balanced against each other so that major war implies an almost inconceivable and certainly, once started, irreversible plunge into chaos, the defence of Britain's nation interests is decreasingly within the power of Britain's armed defence services. Conflict, aggression even (as can be plainly seen in the case of Iceland), becomes a matter of law. diplomacy, economic pressures, in a word non-military. Britain reacted to the revelation of her military inadequacy provided by the Boer War by creating the Committee of Imperial Defence, whose organisation ensured that we entered two world wars in a state of preparedness (and in 1939 of foreknowledge) which made the mobilisation of our own resources for survival greater than in anY other belligerent with the possible exception of Soviet Russia, There would seem to be 3 need today for a similar committee to advise on and to organise the non-military defence of British assets and possessions at a time when the wholesale appropriation of those assets bY envious and insecure authoritarian regimes of minor countries seeking external loci for the internal discontents aroused by their own incompetence and corruption is more likely to increase rather than decrease, The old CID's job was to advise on future perils as well as to prepare for existing ones, and to ensure that Britain's defence effort was best directed le support and mesh in with her diplomaeY. Somewhat similar responsibilities would be laid on a non-military defence committee which would have the conservation and utilisation of British resources, including those of our scattered but strategically well-located residual overseas territories, for all of which the sea is of the utmost importance. Britain. said Nye Bevan in 1945, is built on coal and surrounded by fish. This is still true and maY well prove, as it did originally, the source of strength and wealth for her peoples. But only if government and society are properly organised to take advantage of them.
Donald Watt is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics.
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