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I would be happy to answer any questions about the events that led 

 up to the 1988 amendments if you have them. 



We would like to report to you today briefly on the outcome of 

 the Marine Mammal Exemption Program that has been in place 

 since 1989, our criticisms of that program, our response to the 

 agency's proposed regime, which was presented to you by the previ- 

 ous panel, our key concerns for the reauthorization, and finally a 

 little crystal ball prognosis which is quite cloudy on the prospect of 

 the negotiations that we are engaged in with our colleagues in the 

 fishing industry. 



As you know, the 1988 amendments to Section 114 in the MMPA 

 created a five-year program exempting commercial fishing from 

 the incidental taking prohibitions on the Act. The objective was to 

 provide time to collect reliable information about the interactions 

 between marine mammals and commercial fishing and to allow 

 commercial fishing operations to continue despite the Kokechik de- 

 cision. 



The MMEP or the Marine Mammal Exemption Program that 

 was implemented after the 1980 amendments hasn't entirely ful- 

 filled all of our expectations or even the requirements. We have 

 some concerns about the program, but we would like to say before 

 we start listing the problems that the key point is that whatever 

 its shortcomings, the Marine Mammal Exemption Program has col- 

 lected a lot of information that we believe can be useful, can be 

 used to form a basis for the regime that we craft next, and where 

 we go from here. 



The program results, including the numbers of vessels registered, 

 the categories of fisheries, marine mammals taken and^ so forth, 

 are all detailed in our written statement and so I won't go into 

 that now. But I will indicate that the principal problems have to do 

 with the basic size of the universe; that is, we have found that the 

 agency is unable to answer the question how many vessels are fish- 

 ing? Therefore, they cannot answer the question of those fishing, 

 how many are registered? Of those registered, how many report? 

 Of those that report, what is the incidental take level? Of the inci- 

 dental take, how much is mortality? And so as you start to slice 

 this reporting down further and further, you get a less accurate 

 picture of what is really going on. 



The second major criticism we have had of the program is that it 

 has had no capacity for in-season management; that is, even 

 though there is a lot of paperwork going on, the results of the pa- 

 perwork don't find their way into the system until well after the 

 season is over. So that if the program had ever surfaced a problem 

 even though the Section 114 gives the agency authority to take 

 action during the course of a fishery, the information has never 

 been gained in time to do anything about that. Reports from ob- 

 servers indicate that mammal interactions are significantly under- 

 estimated by the logbook reports. 



Moving on to the agency's framework, we have a variety of con- 

 cerns mostly related to the issues such as current carrying capac- 

 ity, how the regime proposes to incorporate nonlethal takes, and 

 some other concerns that are fairly small and detailed, but, again, 

 these are listed in our statement. 



