13 

 Regional Councils which are charged with managing the marine 

 fisheries of the U.S. under PI 94-265 will be faced with con- 

 flicting pressures to alter the bill in the face of changing 

 conditions. In the absence of accurate baseline data, managers 

 and politicians may have nothing on which to rely other than 

 the vague recollections of interested parties. It may, in fact, 

 be very difficult to reconstruct what the fishing communities 

 were like before regulations went into effect. It is not only 

 that observers will selectively recall events favorable to their 

 case, but that observers in the same community will undoubtedly 

 have different recollections about their communities, about 

 fishing, and about the effects of the bill on them. 



The future of the fishing industry is difficult to fore- 

 see. One thing is almost certain to happen. Somehow, the 

 "impossible present" v;ill be transformed into the "good old days" — 

 a golden age when there was no Government regulation to foul 

 everything up. When this occurs it may be very difficult to 

 assess exactly what effects specific regulations have had. 



Tv/o kinds of baseline data need to be collected by differ- 

 ent kinds of research techniques. First, we need quantitative 

 demographic, social, and economic data on a large sample of 

 fishermen and fishing ports. I suggest this data be obtained by; 

 (1) administering a questionnaire to a representative sample of 

 household heads of families in the fishing business to obtain 

 data on family size, age and sex breakdown, range of occupations, 

 consumption patterns, ethnicity, kinship ties, work experience. 



