Since the national appropriation of large sea areas has become more and more usual, and since the U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea has revealed that the fixation of straight baselines, the enlargement of the territorial sea to a distance of 12 nautical miles, the establishment of EEZs with a maximum breadth of 200 nautical miles, and the association of the continental shelf, in some cases even beyond this, may become international law, all the coastal states, as to be expected, have pursued an extreme seaward expansionist policy. Every state can convincingly point to its urgent need for maritime resources. This especially applies to the 23 island states and island territories in the South Pacific, which, apart from a few exceptions, do not have any other natural resources of economic significance. The exceptions are Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and Nauru, and to a lesser extent Fiji and the Solomon Islands, where mineral resources are being exploited. Vanuatu certainly also possesses undeveloped deposits. Hawaii, as part of the United States, has had a totally different economic development, and therefore the adjacent sea areas must be regarded as being of less importance to the country. All the remaining islands, however, are suitable for only limited agricultural utilization. The sea, on the other hand, contains fish as a reproductive resource for the world market. Up to 95 per cent of these fish are caught, manufactured and sold by foreign long-distance fishing fleets (in 1983, approximately 1,200 ships, almost entirely from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the USSR, and the United States) (cf. Buchholz 1983). The instruments of the newly established Law of the Sea Convention can be effectively applied in order to increase the economic potential of these small insular countries.

The South Pacific insular states began only recently to place their adjacent sea areas under their sovereignty. In contrast to the East and Southeast Asian sea areas at the periphery of the oceans, the maritime law declarations by the island countries related to the column of water, rather than to the continental shelf.