ECONOMICS OF THE FISHERIES 403 



that of any other region. While the entire Atlantic-Gulf section of the ocean 

 and coastal fisheries increased production of food fish by 32 per cent and 

 received unchanged (—0.8 per cent) purchasing power in return for it, the 

 Great Lakes received 41 per cent more purchasing power income for 17 

 per cent less food fish. These facts demonstrate that insistent demand for 

 a limited supply of fish (or a limited supply of fish for which there is an 

 insistent demand) expresses itself in higher prices. They also show that 

 depletion, or diminishing abundance of a species or of a whole fishery, is not 

 necessarily disadvantageous to fishermen. In the case of the Lakes, scarcity 

 has produced a disproportionate rise in prices which was decidedly advan- 

 tageous to the fishermen as a group. 



Meanwhile, the Great Lakes have not been "fished out"; it may not be 

 possible to prove by formal logic that it is impossible to exhaust an exten- 

 sive fishery for profit because the profit disappears before the fish does, 

 but it is obvious as a matter of economics that as a fish becomes scarcer rising 

 prices must check sales of it as well as attract competition from other fishes; 

 and also that increasing cost and diminishing returns per unit of effort must 

 always check production at some point far short of extinction. To check 

 the exploitation of a fishery it is not necessary that profits disappear; they 

 need only decline to a point equal to or lower than that of some other 

 comparable fishery or even of some other occupation not fishing. For men 

 will not work without reward, nor will they work at one trade for less than 

 they can earn from another. 



As supplies in the Lakes and rivers became scarcer, rising prices checked 

 sales and performed their classic function of rationing the product to those 

 who were able and willing to pay, establishing after 1920 an equilibrium at 

 a level of production some 17 per cent lower than it was from 1887 to 1908 

 based on the figures regularly published by the Federal Government (or 

 2 5 per cent lower if we use the figures of the International Board of Inquiry 

 (1943) for the Great Lakes). The rising prices and scarcity of Lakes and 

 river fishes became a powerful attraction to fisheries elsewhere, at first 

 drawing imports from the Canadian side of the Great Lakes and from other 

 Canadian lakes; they generated the whiting fishery at Cape Cod about the 

 time of World War I and, this not being enough, they furnished part of 

 the incentive for developing the redfish fishery of New England, the expan- 

 sion of the sales of other ocean fish fillets and various fishes from both 

 Atlantic and Pacific, and even the catfish production as far away as Lake 

 Okeechobee, Florida. Undoubtedly, the shipment of whiting and redfish 

 (both being in size and structure suggestive of small fresh water fishes) 

 to the mid-west contributed to checking somewhat the rise of prices of 

 Lakes and river fish and also of relieving the pressure on the supplies of 



