50 



I would like to point out that not only does this occur with fisher- 

 men, but it occurs with people who represent fishermen or who 

 contract their services to fishermen who may appear on councils, 

 so we included that language. It is similar to the language that the 

 State of Alaska uses. 



That is it. 



The Chairman. Very good. Mr. O'Leary. 



STATEMENT OF KEVIN O'LEARY, VICE PRESIDENT, KODIAK 

 LONGLINE VESSEL OWNERS ASSOCIATION 



Mr. O'Leary. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Senator Stevens. I 

 appreciate the opportunity to make our views known to you at this 

 time. 



I agree wholeheartedly regarding the testimony of Chris 

 Blackburn. She more or less stole my tongue in a number of issues 

 here. Our concerns 



My name is Kevin O'Leary. I am with the Kodiak Longline Ves- 

 sel Owners Association, by the way. 



Our greatest concern with the reauthorization is strengthening of 

 the conservation — of prioritization of conservation issues. We feel 

 that the Commerce Department recently had begun to review ac- 

 tive allocative issues and they are reviewing those allocative issues 

 from sort of a narrow economic benefit to the Nation perspective, 

 as Chris was saying. 



We believe that there are broader implications for the benefit of 

 the resource that have to be taken into consideration as well as the 

 net benefit to the Nation in terms of strictly short-term economic 

 profits. 



We also feel that long-term interests of conservation are some- 

 times lost in a den of short-term profit and we would like the act 

 strengthened in that regard. 



We also feel that social and biological impacts, as well as long- 

 term economic benefit to the resource participants, has to be taken 

 into consideration. Oftentimes it seems that at the council level 

 allocative decisions are being made, short shrift is given to taking 

 a meaningful look at social impacts of some of the council actions, 

 and we believe that that particular aspect of analysis should be 

 greatly increased. We believe that selective gear types should re- 

 ceive a preference, and we would like to see something in the act 

 that strengthens selective gear types in harvesting the resource. 



We believe that the major problem in the industry today is the 

 bycatch and waste issues. Economic — there are two kinds of 

 bycatch and waste. There are economic discards of fish which are 

 legally retained, but are the wrong species or the wrong size and 

 processed quickly, and these fish are dumped over the side and 

 constitute a great deal of wastage. In the Bering Sea from January 

 of this year to August 7, over 470 million pounds of fish have been 

 dumped dead into the ocean. That represents 21.6 percent of all 

 fish caught in the Bering Sea this year. A large majority of the fish 

 that were dumped were caught by factory trawlers and consisted 

 of pollock, Pacific cod, and rock sole, which are all marketable spe- 

 cies. Much of this fish could have and should have been used. In 

 the Pacific cod fishery alone, over 63 million meals were thrown 



