Comunidad del pacífico en perspectiva - Volumen 2

OCEAN RESOURCES AND OCEAN TECHNOLOG1ES IN THE P ACIFIC making nitrogen fertilizer (Du Bois, 1979) and, incidentally, also widely distributed deposits of phosphates (Lee, in preparation). Tapping these for the agricultural development of the Pacific peopIes appears as much a problem of technoIogy and its transfer as it is of socioeconomic inventiveness and políticaI will to addres!> Ionger rather than shorter range national economic planning. As many of these fossil hydrocarbon sources are those of the sea bottom, thdr production will be more expensive than if they were land based. Even as this may increase the number of petroleum producing countries, perhaps to affect the future of OPEC, the price of fossil fuels is not going to become cheaper. The pattern of present and foreseeable future distribution of production sites of fossíl fud (even to include the Arctic and An– taretic) . also affects the routes over which these fuels will be trans– ported to their sites oí use. Shipping routes are limited especially as they are constrained to pass through a smaIl number of oceanic gates. Here, problems of tanker passage through the Straits of Ma– lacea and, in turn, those oí Sunda and Lombok are well known (Finn et al., 1979). Suez, even when not closed to oil, has limits to tanker size, altering the geo-Iogistics of Mideast oi1. Aside from the fact that Pacific islands are close to Indonesian and other (fu– ture) sources of oH from the Sunda shelf or the South China Sea, they are also closer to the Mideast sources of big tanker-transported oil than the east coast of North America. Disregarding, for argu– ment's sake, societal and political mechanisms of the choice of trade routes and of price control, Pacific islands could assume an im– portant role in oH transshipment, if not in oil-based industrial development. Whatever the geopolitics of oil production and shipment, ir is axiomatic that we will turn to the development of small - and large-scale natural energy sources and that some of them will soon be competitive in price lO those fueled by coal, oil or gas, or by nuclear energy. First, the sun will be used increasingly for tasks that demand the application of low temperatures such as the heat– ing of water, the drying of crops, and evaporative cooling. A large part of the Pacific líes in the path of trade winds, another in the path of ~he monsoons. Both kinds of wind {orces are related to the 139