1117 
The promotion of agriculture and forestry has been a prime activity of govern- 
ment since the foundation of the republic and before. Beginning a hundred years 
and more ago the promotion of such use of the land by the homestead acts, the 
land grant college act, and the provision of many other incentives to settlers, 
permitted the settlement of the west. The whole matter of improving agricul- 
tural production was much stimulated by heavily increased selective subsidies, 
expanded research, support prices, and many other incentives to the farmer 
since about 1932. The total Federal contribution to this effort is epitomized by 
the appropriations to the Department of Agriculture which have been in excess 
of $7 billion per year in recent years. The individual State of the Union provide 
other large funds to these purposes. The budget of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial 
Fisheries runs at only about $50 million a year. 
Despite all of the outeries about cost, subsidies, and special benefits to 
agriculture it is obvious that the worth of these activities to the nation has 
been much greater than their cost. The percentage of income which the United 
States citizen pays for food is less than that in any other country, and the least 
in history. The United States can be, and has been (under extremity), the 
granary of the world and the food support of its allies. The agricultural tech- 
nology it has thus developed is being transferred steadily to other parts of the 
world to relieve hunger, want and disease. The contribution of this to the posture 
of the United States and the welfare of itself and the world has been out of 
all proportion to its cost. 
Similarly great incentives have been provided to the fossil fuel industries by 
the Government, and this has been particularly true of the petroleum industry 
for many years. The 27% tax depletion allowance has provided enormous incen- 
tive to development of these resources on a world-wide basis, and this has been 
expanded by import controls (as with agriculture), close integration with both 
foreign and domestic policy, and the ability to combine and act together in certain 
situations in manners not permitted other enterpreneurs. 
Again ‘there have been continuous outcries about the cost of this, and the 
preferential benefits to that industry. Again the benefits to the nation have 
grossly outweighed the cost in the simple facts that the United Sates petroleum 
industry dominates this branch of industry in the world, has had the ability 
to provide the United States and its allies with abundant energy in times of 
peace and war, has had the strength to conduct the research which has spun 
off the great new petro-chemical industries whose products now pervade our 
society, and the ability to continuously explore for, discover, and bring into 
economic production enormous reserves of resources in all parts of the world, 
both on the land and under the sea. All this has been done while keeping the 
cost of energy and the other products from these resources at such a low level 
that the social and economic benefits to society far outweigh the costs. 
The third large source of organic material, the living resources of the sea, 
has been very nearly ignored by the United States for the past two generations. 
Expenditures and activities to promote production from these enormous resources 
have been kept at low level; incentives have not been provided for domestic 
fishermen to go upon the sea; basic and applied research on ocean resources has 
been poorly funded; management of their use has been generally left to the 
50 State Governments; incentives and aids have been provided to foreign ocean 
producers to compete with national industry ; tariff and other barriers to imports 
have been lowered to encourage the products of foreign fishermen to enter the 
domestic market; stringent application has been made of the anti-trust regula- 
tions which prevent cooperation among business entities normal to the agricul- 
tural and petroleum fields; world wide operations of United States firms have 
not been integrated to foreign policy as with either agricultural or petroleum 
firms; incentives have not been provided for fishing firms to explore, develop 
and produce. 
The detail and results of this inattention are treated below but can be summed 
up by saying that the catch of U.S. flag vessels was a little less in 1967 than 
it was in 1934; 71.4% by original weight of the fish and shellfish used by the 
United States in 1967 was imported at a cost of $687 million (a fair percentage 
of the foreign exchange imbalance) ; and that known living resources in coastal 
waters are so underutilized that production from them could be increased by a 
factor of 10. The attraction of these large underused resources is so great that 
fishermen of 14 nations in Europe and Asia come to these coasts for these 
harvests and take from them each year somewhat more than half as much as 
do U.S. flag fishermen, which results in considerable political and diplomatic 
interaction. 
