Forty Years Of The Coordinating Committee For Geoscience - CCOP

An Important Decision in Tokyo
The recommendations of the Working Group were to face close scrutiny at a meeting convened
in Tokyo in November 1965 in conjunction with the ‘Third ECAFE Symposium on Development
of Petroleum Resources’. There the Executive Secretary of ECAFE invited representatives of the
governments of all interested countries in Asia to consider what action might be taken in
connection with the establishment of a “Committee for Co-ordination of Prospecting for Mineral
Resources in Asian Offshore Areas”. It is notable that the original wording of the title of the
proposed committee did not refer specifically to hydrocarbons and was not restricted to any
particular region of Asia.
The Tokyo meeting was attended by representatives of the governments of ten Asian countries;
Burma, Ceylon, China 1 , India, Iran, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, The Philippines and
Thailand. It was chaired by the Managing Director of the National Petrochemical Company of
Iran.
The proposal to establish a committee to coordinate offshore activities of the ECAFE region
came as a surprise to many delegates from the geological surveys with the minor exception of
those intimate with the deliberations of the earlier Expert Group Meeting. Although operational
international cooperative projects in geosciences had been expected to be sponsored by ECAFE
by many geological surveys of the region, and marine survey was an extremely timely and
necessary field, most of the geological surveys were not involved in petroleum exploration and
were wary of the direction of the discussion.
There were many discussions regarding the merits and demerits of establishing such an
organization. One line of thinking in favour, mostly held by some geological surveys in East
Asia, was that this organization would provide an extremely strong stimulus for promoting
marine geosciences, an activity which would not be possible without outside assistance because
of the lack of capability of the institutions in the area and the very large expenses involved. The
new organization might be used for actually implementing such surveys because offshore oil
exploration cannot be carried out without basic geological surveys; in short, these people could
see that the interest in offshore oil and the resulting proposal might provide the possibility for the
member country geological surveys to “join the advanced marine geology club” through this socalled
coordinating committee.
Many, government administrators, accepted the facts underpinning the proposal, recognising the
increasing importance of offshore hydrocarbon and other mineral resources and also the fact that
the institutions of the ECAFE region were lagging behind their European and North and South
American counterparts.
Arguments against such a proposal were more diverse. It was a strong opinion that there was so
much on land which was still unknown, and so much work still to do with the necessary skilled
personnel and funds in such short supply, now was not the time for such dreamy and uncertain
new ventures. Also the fact that petroleum exploration was mostly carried out by national or
private corporations with extremely large exploration budgets and the geological surveys, from
whom most of the ECAFE correspondents in the mineral resources field were drawn, were rarely
involved, the emphasis on oil raised questions as to the incentives in such a proposal for the
geological surveys and mine bureaus. There were questions from the administrative units of
various governments concerning the wisdom of expanding UN organisations. They felt that they
were feeding enough international civil servants as it was, and a new and ambiguous
organization was not in line with their thinking. In the early stages of the discussions outside the
1 At that time ‘China’ was represented in the United Nations by The Republic of China, to be
replaced in 1971 by the Peoples Republic of China as the only legal representative of ‘China’.
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A World of Difference