money is at stake, you obviously face the terrible prospect of lost 

 jobs and wages. 



And so the question is: How do we manage this in a way that 

 minimizes losses, and maximizes the long-term capacity of the fish- 

 eries? That's the task in front of us. 



Now, 13 out of 17 global fisheries are today at jeopardy. Despite 

 the worldwide driftnet ban that Ted Stevens of Alaska and I 

 pushed the Bush administration to get through the U.N., the Ital- 

 ians are still out there with driftnets. And when one group breaks 

 the rules, it creates a terrible sense of unfairness and anger among 

 other groups, and it forces the whole system to begin to come apart 

 because people say "well, if they are doing it, then why can't we 

 do it?" 



What we have seen in Canada in the last couple of days is frank- 

 ly, I think, only the beginning of the kind of conflict that may grow 

 between countries as this resource diminishes and as the pressures 

 grow politically. 



We saw what happened earlier this year when France unilater- 

 ally rejected fish products from this region. 



I have been urging the Secretary of State for some period of time 

 to put this issue more directly on the international agenda. This is 

 going to have to be resolved internationally, folks, not unilaterally, 

 multilaterally. 



Let me give you a stark reality. You could reduce the fishing 

 fleet of Norway by 50 percent and you could reduce the fishing fleet 

 of Iceland by 40 percent, and they would still be able to go out and 

 catch as much fish as they are catching today. So, we have got to 

 try to figure out amongst ourselves how we deal with these issues. 



There are many issues. Take, for example, by-catch. How do you 

 deal with the problem of the amount offish you scoop up when you 

 are out there to catch one species and you throw away another spe- 

 cies that is part of the ecosystem? And the by-catch species may 

 be an important part of the food chain. We don't even know what 

 happens if you begin stripping away that other part of the biota. 

 What is the ecological balance between those things you want to 

 catch? 



In addition to by-catch problems, you have a serious economic 

 problem. I proposed a vessel buy-back plan when we got the $30 

 million to help this year, I specifically said to the Secretary of Com- 

 merce "we must begin to buy back excess fishing capacity. You 

 have to have some limited entry, but you want to minimize the 

 negative economic impact of people who have a mortgage, a home, 

 kids. You have to help the transition out of this dilemma." We still, 

 I think, have to do that. 



In addition to the buy-back, we have serious problems with en- 

 forcement. If some fishermen see certain fishermen going out and 

 breaking the rules, then there is every incentive in the world for 

 them to go out and break the rules. And if everybody is out there 

 breaking the rules, then you have invited the government to step 

 in, and in a stronger way, which only creates greater anger within 

 the process. 



But the bottom line is that if everybody breaks the rules, every- 

 body will be out of business. We will destroy the fishing industry. 



