Gulf of Mexico Origin, Waters, and Biota: Volume 2, Ocean and Coastal Economy

Gulf of Mexico Origin, Waters, and Biota: Volume 2, Ocean and Coastal Economy

Gulf of Mexico Origin, Waters, and Biota: Volume 2, Ocean and Coastal Economy

Gulf of Mexico Origin, Waters, and Biota: Volume 2, Ocean and Coastal Economy

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Overview

The many economic factors affecting sustainability of the Gulf of Mexico region are perhaps as important as the waves on its shores and its abundant marine life. This second volume in Gulf of Mexico Origin, Waters, and Biota (a multivolumed work edited by John W. Tunnell Jr., Darryl L. Felder, and Sylvia A. Earle) assesses the Gulf of Mexico as a single economic region. The book provides information and baseline data useful for assessing the goals of economic and environmental sustainability in the Gulf. In five chapters, economists, political scientists, and ecologists from Florida, California, Louisiana, Texas, Maine, and Mexico cover topics such as: the idea of the Gulf as a transnational community; the quantitative value of its productivity; a summary of the industries dependent on the Gulf, including shipping, tourism, oil and gas mining, fisheries, recreation, and real estate; the human uses and activities that affect coastal economies; and the economic trends evident in Mexico's drive toward coastal development. This first-of-its-kind reference work will be useful to scientists, economists, industry leaders, and policy makers whose work requires an understanding of the economic issues involved in science, business, trade, exploration, development, and commerce in the Gulf of Mexico.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781603442701
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Publication date: 12/07/2008
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 136
File size: 9 MB

About the Author

JAMES C. CATO is senior associate dean and director of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Florida, where he is also professor of food and resource economics and former director of the Florida Sea Grant College Program. An expert on fisheries economics with more than 160 publications, he is also coauthor of Marine Ornamental Species: Collection, Culture & Conservation

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Gulf of Mexico Origin, Waters, and Biota

Volume 2, Ocean and Coastal Economy


By James C. Cato

Texas A&M University Press

Copyright © 2009 Texas A&M University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60344-270-1



CHAPTER 1

The Gulf of Mexico Region as a Transnational Community

TERRY L. McCOY


Introduction

This chapter assesses the prospects for the Gulf of Mexico region to evolve into an integrated transnational community. The underlying question is whether the Gulf functions as a barrier separating or a bridge uniting the coastal regions of the three countries that share it. Answering that question involves addressing a number of related ideas: Are trade and investment flows, transportation networks, demographic movements, intergovernmental collaboration, and civil society interaction knitting the Gulf territories of the United States and Mexico together across the Gulf? Do officials and residents of the region think of themselves as belonging to a Gulf community? Is there a growing sense of community identification accompanied by transnational institution building? And where does Cuba, the third Gulf nation, fit?

The original impetus for this research, which began in the mid-1990s, was the launch of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which promised a new era in United States–Mexico relations (see McCoy, 1996, for early work). A decade later it is appropriate to assess the extent to which the predicted changes have in fact occurred.

In the early 1990s the negotiations leading up to NAFTA were followed by the battle for congressional approval in the United States. This debate focused attention on the special relationship between the United States and Mexico, two North American nations with different historical origins and different levels of economic development. To an important extent, the long land border shared by the two countries had been the defining geographic linkage in the bilateral relationship. The southwestern United States and northern Mexico–linked cross-border trade and investment, tourism, migration, and other activities constituted an authentic "border region" (Raat, 1992). But the United States and Mexico shared another border—that defined by the Gulf of Mexico—and to a lesser extent NAFTA refocused attention on the Gulf region. At the 1995 Gulf of Mexico Symposium, a Texas state official referred to the Gulf as the "forgotten border" between the United States and Mexico, according to a Miami Herald article. The agreement calling for formation of an association of the Gulf states of Mexico and the United States emphasized that they share a "well-defined geographic region" and "many areas of common interest" (Accord of the States of the Gulf of Mexico, 1995).

To examine the extent to which the Gulf is now, or in the post-NAFTA era is evolving into, an integrated transnational border region or community analogous to the land frontier shared by the United States and Mexico, this chapter begins by offering a working definition of the Gulf of Mexico region. It then reviews the history of relations in the Gulf area. In this regard, the historical record provides little evidence that prior to NAFTA the Gulf in fact constituted an integrated transnational region defined by clear separation from surrounding territory and interdependence of the coastal territories that make it up (Bassols Batalla Angel in Ávila Sánchez, 1993). Subsequent analysis of the region's current configuration, paying particular attention to economic flows across the Gulf and intergovernmental cooperation following implementation of NAFTA, provides scant evidence that the Gulf of Mexico is evolving toward becoming a transnational community. An obvious obstacle to a fully integrated Gulf is the anomalous status of Cuba, which has normal bilateral relations with Mexico but has not had full diplomatic and trade relations with its Gulf neighbor to the north for over four decades.


Defining the Gulf Region

The Gulf of Mexico is "a Mediterranean-type basin bounded by the North American continent and the island of Cuba" and "connected with the Caribbean Sea by the Yucatán Strait and with the Atlantic by the Straits of Florida" (Darnell and Defenbaugh, 1990). Making up the region's land territory are eleven maritime states of the United States and Mexico (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas; Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo) plus the four Gulf Coast provinces of Cuba (Pinar del Río, Havana, Havana City, and Matanzas).

The Gulf The Gulf of Mexico itself is the defining geographic feature of the region. The Gulf's three major physiographic features are "a shoreline bordered by coastal plains and mountains; a surrounding, generally wide, continental shelf; and a large, off-central basin" (Gore, 1992). The Gulf is one of the world's largest and deepest marine basins. Its maximum width is approximately 1,000 miles in an east-west direction, and its narrowest width is about 500 miles in a north-south direction, from the Mississippi delta to the Yucatán Peninsula. The marine continental shoreline, from Cape Sable, Florida, to the tip of the Yucatán Peninsula, is about 3,600 miles, with the Gulf coast of Cuba adding another 240 miles in length. But the total U.S. Gulf shoreline alone, with bays, inlets, and other features included, is over 17,000 miles long (Gore, 1992).

The major natural resources of the Gulf of Mexico are its marine life and petroleum deposits, both of which have played a role in shaping the history and economics of the region. The Gulf also supports waterborne transportation and recreation. The important features of the Gulf affecting shipping are its winds, which vary considerably with location and season; surface currents, the most important being the Yucatán Current and the Loop Current; and storms (Sheppard, 1994). Its waters and surrounding territory experience seasonal tropical storms and hurricanes.

The 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty gave the United States and Mexico bigger stakes and greater control over the resources of the Gulf. Ninety-five percent of its harvestable living resources, 98% of the petroleum resources, and significant mineral resources lie within each country's 200-mile economic zone in the Gulf, authorized by the treaty (Gore, 1992).

The Gulf, rich in marine life, has historically been an important source of fish, seafood, employment, and income for the three countries that border it as well as for the other nations that fish it. In addition to commercial fishing, the Gulf supports growing recreational fishing, diving, and marine-based tourism—all of which are increasingly in conflict with commercial fishing—in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, as well as a declining artisanal industry in Mexico. Pressures to increase fish catches, along with overlapping state, national, and international jurisdictions over Gulf waters and seafloor, put marine life at risk of overexploitation.

Petroleum constitutes the Gulf's other important natural resource, and one not easily compatible with the Gulf's marine life. The first successful U.S. offshore oil drilling occurred in 1938 off the Louisiana coast (Gore, 1992). From there, oil exploration in the Gulf expanded rapidly, and on the eve of NAFTA, it was the focal point of U.S. offshore activity. In 1994 the Gulf of Mexico accounted for "91 percent of the total acreage under lease in the Alaska, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] regions and ... over 76 percent of the bonus high [lease] bids" (MMS, 1994). With 810 active fields, the Gulf produced 89% of all OCS oil and 99% of OCS gas. In 1993, estimated reserves in fields leased by the Minerals Management Service stood at 2.144 billion barrels for oil and 29.090 trillion cubic feet for gas (MMS, 1994). Intense bidding for Gulf leases in 1995 confirmed that the Gulf was likely to remain the most important petroleum region in the United States for some time (Salpukas, 1995).

Although the Mexican oil industry has a long history along the Gulf Coast, the Mexican state oil company PEMEX did not drill the first offshore wells until the 1960s. Following the Mexican oil boom of the 1970s, the head of PEMEX described the Campeche Sound area off the west coast of Yucatán as "the greatest offshore field ever" (quoted in Grayson, 1980).

The steep increase in global energy prices experienced early in the twenty-first century triggered renewed interest in deepwater exploration in the Gulf and put added pressure on the United States and Mexico to open their Gulf waters to drilling. In early 2006, prospects for new oil discoveries, plus active Cuban exploration in its territorial waters, led the U.S. Congress to relax drilling restrictions in the Gulf. Then, in September 2006, three large multinational oil companies announced that their deepwater test wells in U.S. Gulf waters had made a major discovery, which "confirms very large reserves of recoverable oil in the Gulf" (Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, quoted in Krauss, 2006).


Gulf States and Provinces The Gulf states are part of a great coastal plain that stretches from the southeastern Atlantic Coast of the United States to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. This plain is bounded by the Appalachian chain on the north in the eastern United States, bisected by the Mississippi River system, and bounded on the west by the Sierra Madre Oriental in Mexico. With a very gentle slope, the plain is broad in the United States and northern Mexico but nearly disappears in the mountainous state of Veracruz.

The natural resources of the Gulf states are their climate, soils, rivers, and minerals. The onshore petroleum deposits of Louisiana, Texas, and the Mexican Gulf Coast are the most important mineral resources. Non-petroleum minerals include the phosphate rock of Florida; salt (halite) in Louisiana and Texas; and sand, clay, gravel, and sulfur from various areas (Gore, 1992). The region's climate and soils constitute important agricultural resources. Florida, and to a lesser extent Louisiana and Texas, produce citrus, cane sugar, winter fruits, and vegetables. This combination is found on Mexico's Gulf Coast, while the middle Gulf states of Alabama and Mississippi specialize in temperate grains, cotton, livestock, and poultry. Forests have been an enduring resource on the Gulf Coast, while the estuaries are ideal for aquaculture. The Gulf and the region's rivers constitute a major transportation resource for the United States, and together with the climate they have supported the development of tourism in the twentieth century (Gore, 1992).

Despite the Gulf region's substantial resources, most notably petroleum, the Gulf states in the United States and Mexico have historically constituted poor, peripheral regions for both countries. The same is not true of Cuba. The location of Havana—Cuba's capital city, principal port, and economic and population center—endows Cuba with a strong Gulf orientation, more so than was historically the case for either the United States or Mexico.


History of Transnational Relations on the Gulf

Although a common, harmonious history is not a prerequisite for regional integration, as post–World War II Europe demonstrates, such a history can help shape a modern transnational community. However, the history of the Gulf of Mexico following European discovery was anything but harmonious. Competition among the leading imperial powers left the Gulf fragmented, not unified, after three centuries of European colonization. By the end of the nineteenth century, the pattern emerging in relations among the three independent nation-states that shared the Gulf was one of asymmetry under U.S. domination.


European Colonization The Gulf region was one of the earliest sites of European contact in the Americas, but European conquest and colonization proved disastrous for the native peoples and cultures. Of the peoples inhabiting the entire region at the time of conquest, only the Mayas of the Yucatán Peninsula and highland Indians of Mexico survived. While successful in eliminating indigenous threats to their colonization projects, the Europeans did not succeed in imposing unity on the Gulf.

Columbus reached Cuba on his first voyage, and the Spanish returned for good in 1511. From Havana, they set out to conquer and colonize the territory of the Gulf. In 1517 the governor of Cuba sent an expedition to explore the Gulf Coast of Mexico. When it returned to Cuba with stories of wealthy Indian civilization, he dispatched Hernando Cortés on another expedition. Cortés established the Gulf settlement of Veracruz, from which he launched the well-chronicled conquest of the Aztec empire from 1519 to 1520 (Burkholder and Johnson, 1994). The Spanish experience in Florida was less rewarding. Several expeditions—including Hernando de Soto's from 1539 to 1542—explored the peninsula from Havana, but settlement did not occur until later because Florida had little apparent wealth. West Florida, a separate subunit in the Spanish empire, was settled from Mexico and administered through Veracruz during the first Spanish period.

Although late settlement was the pattern around the Gulf, the Spanish presence and trade routes were established by the end of the sixteenth century (Gore, 1992), and it did not take long for other European powers to be attracted to the Gulf. To protect its trade from both private buccaneers and foreign navies, Spain instituted a fortified fleet system to carry treasure back to the mother country. One of the three major routes was between Veracruz and Seville through Havana, which claimed for Cuba the title of "Llave del Golfo," or Key to the Gulf. As a result Havana emerged as the dominant city in Cuba, instead of Santiago on the southeastern coast, and Cuba developed a predominantly Gulf orientation rather than a focus on the Caribbean (CubaNews, 1995). The Spanish founded St. Augustine on the northeastern frontier of its incipient New World empire in 1565 and incorporated its fortifications into the strategic defense system centered in Havana. Florida functioned as an appendage of Mexico and Cuba, subsidized by a stipend (situado) from the viceroyalty of New Spain funneled through Havana (Bretos, 1991).

France and England soon became Spain's principal rivals on the Gulf, with the primary French challenge coming from the north. Their earliest thrust, which the Spanish repelled, was in northeast Florida. Then in 1682 LaSalle descended the Mississippi from Canada and claimed the entire Mississippi delta for France. LaSalle's challenge, and the French maps of the region, which fell into Spanish hands, heightened Spain's interest in the Gulf Coast (Jackson et al., 1990). The British challenged Spanish hegemony from both south and north. From the north, Britain made repeated forays by land and sea into Florida, while they also threatened Spanish territory from the Caribbean.

Spain's response to threats from European rivals was to secure the northern boundary of its American empire. As buffers against French threats, the strategy included building a network of missions in Texas beginning in the 1720s and establishing Fort San Carlos on Pensacola Bay on the northern coast; the fort was recaptured in 1723 after four years of French occupation. Spain successfully defended St. Augustine against the English in the wars for Spanish Succession, and successfully defended Jenkins's Ear on the northeastern border of its defensive perimeter (Burkholder and Johnson, 1994).

In spite of these moves, Spain's position in the Gulf region gradually eroded, and the Gulf of Mexico became increasingly fragmented. In the French and Indian War from 1754 to 1763, in which Spain sided with France, the British captured Havana and then forced Spain to accept it in exchange for Florida in the peace settlement. France conceded most of its North American territory to Great Britain in this same settlement (Gannon, 1993). By siding with the rebels and engaging the British militarily along the Gulf Coast, Spain regained Florida in 1783 following the independence of the United States from Great Britain. But the country could not long withstand the expansionist pressures of the new American nation (Gannon, 1993). In 1819 Spain and the United States signed the Adams-Onis treaty transferring Florida, which was then two colonies, to the United States.

Spain's loss of Florida was followed by its defeat at the hands of Mexicans fighting for their independence. With this, Spain's Gulf presence was reduced to its colony in Cuba, and the United States steadily eclipsed Spain as the dominant Gulf power.


U.S. Expansion in the Nineteenth Century A defining feature of relations in the Gulf is the hegemony—and ongoing resistance to it—of the United States. On the eve of its independence in 1823, Mexico had been Spain's richest, largest, and most important New World colony, but the first decades as an independent republic would prove difficult for Mexico. At the time the United States was a young agrarian country and Cuba was a forgotten Spanish colony. Over the rest of the nineteenth century, the United States gathered strength economically and militarily, while Mexico and Cuba stagnated, and this growing disparity facilitated U.S. domination of the Gulf region.

Even before acquiring Florida, the newly independent United States had purchased the Louisiana Territory, securing its first major outlet to the Gulf, while at the same time eliminating France from the region and denying additional territory on the Gulf to Spain (Gore, 1992). Louisiana achieved statehood in 1812, which was the same year Andrew Jackson defeated the British in New Orleans in the War of 1812 to end the English threat on the Gulf for good; statehood followed for Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819. Invoking the geopolitical spirit of the soon-to-be-pronounced Monroe Doctrine, the United States acquired Florida in 1819 to prevent it from being transferred from Spain to Great Britain (Langley, 1989), and this extensive Gulf territory became a U.S. state in 1845. The annexation of Texas, also in 1845, was the final building block in the U.S. Gulf presence.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Gulf of Mexico Origin, Waters, and Biota by James C. Cato. Copyright © 2009 Texas A&M University Press. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword: Fifty-Year Update of Bulletin 89 JOHN W. TUNNELL JR., DARRYL L. FELDER, AND SYLVIA A. EARLE,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter 1. The Gulf of Mexico Region as a Transnational Community TERRY L. MCCOY,
Chapter 2. The Productive Value of the Gulf of Mexico DAVID W. YOSKOWITZ,
Chapter 3. An Economic Overview of Selected Industries Dependent upon the Gulf of Mexico CHARLES M. ADAMS, EMILIO HERNANDEZ, AND JIM LEE,
Chapter 4. The Changing Coastal and Ocean Economies of the United States Gulf of Mexico JUDITH T. KILDOW, CHARLES S. COLGAN, AND LINWOOD PENDLETON,
Chapter 5. Environmental Sustainability of Economic Trends in the Gulf of Mexico: What Is the Limit for Mexican Coastal Development? ALEJANDRO YÁÑEZ-ARANCIBIA, JOSÉ J. RAMÍREZ-GORDILLO, JOHN W. DAY, AND DAVID W. YOSKOWITZ,
Contributors,
Index,

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