SEA GRANT COLLEGES 285 



cause I have considerable experience — and not all together pleasant experience 

 with financing struggling marine institutions). 



As things now stand the powerful oceanographic and marine institutions are 

 related to the wealth of the adjacent hinterland and not necessarily to the 

 wealth or importance of the marine ai-ea around them. The area from Pas- 

 cagoula, Mississippi to Port Arthur. Texas produces annually twenty to twenty- 

 two per cent of all the fishery products in the United States. I have called it 

 the Fertile Fishery Crescent and it should be noted further that the United 

 States coast of the Gulf of Mexico produces Forty per cent of all the fishery 

 products of the United States. The continental shelf of this same region pro- 

 duces vast quantities of oil, gas and sulphur. Yet the monies spent on oceano- 

 graphic research in this area by the Federal government is probably in inverse 

 proportion to the marine wealth which it produces now every year. There are 

 a large number of economic factors behind this situation and it would take me 

 several pages to expound upon them. 



The expenditures of money by the Federal government must, in the terms of a 

 popular song, "go where the action is" and the acition does not necessai'ily lie 

 in the neighborhood of the big institutions, which are sometimes not interested 

 in the distant areas and seldom travel there. The Gulf of Mexico is one of the 

 most important marine areas in North America and it is our only interna- 

 tional sea. It has been neglected and I am sorry to say that your bill, as it 

 presently stands, will not take care of this inequity. 



In part your bill merely adds money to the present granting agencies, which 

 means that more and more, larger percentages of money will go to the large 

 institutions which have a staff, the business offices and the wealth with which 

 to go after these grants. Thus, the rich will grow richer, etc. and inevitably 

 areas of great importance will be neglected. 



I would suggest that the Sea Grant University Bill be divorced from the 

 granting agencies completely and that a sum of money be set up by appropria- 

 tion or some other device which will go to each state and to selected institutions 

 of the given states which will carry on the work in their own area. The 

 Idaho potato would never have been developed in Texas and the studies which 

 made for the elimination of the Texas cattle fever would never have occurred in 

 Maine. Nor would they have been made by people in Maine traveling to Texas 

 or those from Texas going to Idaho, etc. Yet all of these things developed 

 through the land grant colleges and they developed because the land grant col- 

 leges took care of things in their own areas. 



Your Sea Grant University idea is one of the most important ones that has 

 been advanced in eradicating the lopsided regional studies of our ocean shores, 

 if it is properly written and properly applied. I should say that to be effective 

 you must have it set up in such a way that each state with a marine border 

 must take care of its own problems through its own institutions. I have no 

 specific suggestions concerning financing except to say that it might be on some 

 sort of a matching basis. Even so some of the poorer states are going to have 

 difiiculty in meeting their obligations on this basis. 



In short I agree with the statement of Dr. George A. Rounsefell, distinguished 

 fisheries biologist of the University of Alabama, which is presented at this 

 hearing. 



(Whereupon, at 11 a.m., the hearing was adjourned, subject to 

 call of the Chair.) 



o 



