ECONOMICS OF THE FISHERIES 463 



and effort of the oystermen, cannot be produced in quantity and be of as 

 high quality as oysters from any other source. 



The State lies between the sub-tropical winter fishery of Florida and the 

 summer fishery of Chesapeake Bay and points north; its fauna is of the 

 nature of both; it has the "fancy" species of Florida, and it has the spring 

 seasonal shad and soft crab before they arrive farther north. For these 

 early seasonal species and a few others the State receives a better price 

 than does the northern competition; for some other species the State re- 

 ceives a lower price than the average of other States. In the oyster, the State 

 seems to be at an economic disadvantage in the later opening and earlier 

 closing of the season and receives a lower price than the average of the rest 

 of the country. 



For the total of all food fish produced, the State receives slightly less 

 (avg. 1938-39-40 = 3.13^) per pound than do the fisheries of the entire 

 Atlantic and Gulf (3.53^), or of the whole country (3.45^). The average 

 price received by North Carolina for all food fish is less than half that 

 received by stock growers of the United States for farm animals; the price 

 received by the fishermen in North Carolina is a much smaller share 

 of the final price paid by the consumer than the farmers' share in the 

 final consumer price of farm animal products of the United States. With 

 inefficiency and high cost of distribution the consumer pays more and the 

 fisherman gets less in proportion to actual cost of production than their 

 counterparts in agricultural food production. 



The number of fishermen in North Carolina was about the same in 1940 

 as it had been in 1890; on the twenty-year annual average between the two 

 world wars, the number decreased by a third from the average of 1887 to 

 1908; the income per fisherman had increased but not sufficiently to com- 

 pensate for the inflation of money, so that the fishermen could buy, with 

 what they received from fishing as an average, slightly (3 per cent) less in 

 the late than in the early period. The fishermen and dealers of the State 

 have no trade association or trade paper for the interchange of ideas or 

 legislative representation; the State has no members in the national Oyster 

 Producers and Dealers Association and there are only four (all corporate) 

 members of the National Fisheries Institute, Inc., the country-wide trade 

 association of fishing industries. 



As a market and potential customer North Carolina, a coastal State, 

 would be expected to consume more fish per capita than the national average. 

 Apparently the State does not consume per capita as much as the national 

 average; certainly not of her own production which, even if it consumed all, 

 would be equivalent only to about one-half to three-fourths of the national 

 per capita average. The State itself and contiguous parts of neighboring 

 States afford a potential market for at least two or three times the present 



