SEA GRANT COLLEGES 51 



The fourth problem in fishery development is the distribution and merchan- 

 dising of the product in such a manner that demand is sufficiently constant to 

 keep costs in the whole system low, and in ways that the cost of distribution does 

 not add so much to cost of end product that producer and processor cannot get 

 enough profit to keep going, or that competitive products will not drive the fish 

 product out of the market, and so that the consumer will repeat his consumption. 



The fifth problem is that the resource, for the most part, is common prop- 

 erty of all nations until reduced to possession. No person can own such a re- 

 source and get the benefits of animal husbandry for hinaself. Thus management 

 of the resource and its use is a public function for the operation of which there 

 is no satisfactory governmental machinery on the international level, and ordi- 

 narily, highly imperfect machinery on the national, state, and local level. This 

 brings all sorts of complicated and vigorous multiple-user problems at all of 

 these levels which are, on a state, national and international level, presently 

 the greatest barriers to ocean fishery development. 



In a word, the fishing industry must first fight the ocean for the fish, then 

 fight ■'the rest of humanity steadily to maintain access to the fish, then fight the 

 rest of humanity for continued access to the market; and, in the end, produce a 

 product in a form acceptable to consumers, at a cost they can and will pay, 

 while leaving profit margins at fishing, processing and merchandising levels 

 adequate to keep people employed therein and to attract adequate capital to these 

 purposes. 



The first and fifth of these problems are reasonably unique to producing 

 food from the ocean. The second problem also has many ocean-induced aspects, 

 but can draw more on ideas, equipment, and developments in related industry. 

 The third sort of problem has even less differentiating it from other food-pro- 

 cessing problems and can draw much from related industrial practices. The 

 fourth sort of problem -- distribution and merchandising-- is not markedly dif- 

 ferent than the same practices in other consumer- oriented industries, and much 

 the same can be said for general management of the enterprise. A difficulty is 

 that all five sorts of problems must be moved along at about the same rate or 

 nothing develops, and the first and fifth sorts of problems are so different from 

 the ordinary land-induced problems of other industries that a very strong sea- 

 flavor must pervade the whole enterprise or it does not grow and prosper. It is 

 in these areas that the educational apparatus in the United States is most de- 

 ficient for the sea-people, and where they need assistance from it most. 



APPROACHING THE FISH 



Fish are affected in their abundance by changes in the environment (which 

 may, and often do, provide changes by an order of magnitude in the incoming 

 year class), and by fishing pressure (the overfishing problem). Disentangling 

 the effects of these two factors on observed changes in abundance calls for the 

 most precise, abstruse, complicated and extensive science. The processes of 

 changes in the environment must be elucidated. The processes of effects of 

 these changes on the biological cycles of the particular resource must be eluci- 

 dated. The effect of differential fishing pressures on resource forms competi- 

 tive with the one being studied is only beginning to be understood and studied. 

 All along the line one must be able first to measure that which seems, at first, 

 incapable of measurement. Physical, chemical and biological oceanography of 

 the most sophisticated nature must be done before these problems can even be 

 approached. When this sort of information is in hand the volume of the resource 

 in the opaque ocean must be measured and the effect of density-independent and 

 density-dependent factors on the abundance of the particular resource must be 

 worked out. Then the fishing effort itself must be calibrated and the sophisti- 

 cated mathematical models, required for relating different fishing pressures to 

 different measured effects on population abundance, must be understood. As 



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