79 



carded because of size or sex or some other economic consider- 

 ation — now that discard was 111,000 metric tons. 



That comes out to about 245 million pounds of fish. That is 

 roughly 6 times the total salmon harvest in Washington State, or 

 it is roughly equal to, in volume, the entire combined commercial 

 harvest of herring, halibut, and shellfish in Alaska. 



We came across those numbers during some investigations we 

 were doing in 1992. So, we decided that perhaps we should have 

 a more in-depth look at what was going on with bycatch and waste 

 in our fisheries. Just to highlight some of our other findings, using 

 processor reports, not observer reports, but processor reports, 

 which come directly from industry, we found that there were 507 

 million pounds of groundfish thrown away in 1992. Of that, 452 

 million pounds came out of the Bering Sea/ Aleutian Islands area. 



In the Bering Sea/Aleutian Island trawl fishery 47 percent of the 

 discards were species being targeted. These were fish that they are 

 targeting on, but for one reason or another the vessel decided to 

 discard those fish. Generally they are dead. They are out of the 

 fishery. And it is a major economic loss for the Nation. By contrast 

 roughly 2 percent of the targeted species compose bycatch and dis- 

 card from hook-and-line fisheries. 



Just to round that all off, the other discards include 20.4 million 

 crab, roughly 100,000 salmon, and over 1 million pounds of herring. 

 This kind of waste, Mr. Chairman, is not acceptable to the State 

 of Alaska and, I think, most people around the country. We have 

 heard a lot about bycatch and discard in other hearings in Wash- 

 ington, DC, and elsewhere, and I think there is a real perception 

 that we need to clean up our fisheries. We have some recommenda- 

 tions for Congress to consider in reauthorizing the Magnuson Act. 



For example, we believe that it would be very useful to give di- 

 rection in the statute to require fishery management plans to set 

 a goal of eliminating discard waste and fully utilizing harvested re- 

 sources. We would like to see such guidance include a requirement 

 for there to be a specified timeframe in each fishery management 

 plan to achieve that goal. 



Similarly we would like to see FMP's — Fishery Management 

 Plans — required to give allocation priority to fishing practices or 

 fishing gear that harvest a given target species with a minimum 

 bycatch. 



When the Magnuson Act was first put together back in the early 

 1970's, the major goal was to Americanize our fishery. The way 

 that Congress chose to accomplish this was to open the door to U.S. 

 industry, and let U.S. industry through its entrepreneurship and 

 enterprise and creativity figure out how to maximize that fishery. 

 I think it exceeded all of our expectations. We Americanized that 

 fishery very quickly by putting industry is the position where they 

 had the incentive to do the job. 



If we were to require that fishery management plans have a pri- 

 ority for using clean gear or clean fishing techniques, and then tell 

 the whole industry, "You guys go figure out how to do it. We do 

 not want to describe how to do it, but there is a race on now. And 

 the winner is the gear group or the group in industry that can fig- 

 ure out how to take those fish in the cleanest possible manner." 



