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Navy and U.S. flag fishing fleet after 1945. There was simply not much of im- 
portance that the U.S. flag fishing industry could do for the Navy that the Navy 
could not do for itself better, cheaper, and more quickly. 
For the first five years after the war elements of the fishing industry were of 
considerable value in assisting the application of technical assistance in Western 
Europe, Latin America and Asia. After this short period this sort of bilateral 
technical assistance by the U.S. tapered off rather sharply and for the past 
decade has been at a low level and desultory, to the point where it has scarcely 
existed for the last five years. 
The domestic U.S. flag fishing industry thus has had no vital national role to 
play in the post war period as it has had in the other leading fish producing 
countries of the world. It has been almost exclusively without government 
guidance outside the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and with as little govern- 
mental support as the Executive Branch of the Government could contrive and 
keep domestic controversy within reasonable limits. The Bureau of Commercial 
Fisheries has not had high level support either in the Department of the Interior 
or in the Bureau of the Budget because domestic fish production was not critical 
to the objectives of the Executive Branch of the Government. Agriculture had the 
votes and the political power in the food field, not the domestic fishermen. The 
United States fish business has thus become exclusively profit motivated in an 
exceedingly competitive millieu, in which the policies of its government increased 
the competitive stress rather than relieved it. 
Asa matter of fact the U.S. flag fishing business has been more a nuisance than 
a benefit to the policies of the Executive Branch of the National Government 
over the past twenty years. Fighting for places in the internal market the ground 
fish industry, the tuna industry, and the shrimp industry have taken vigorous 
actions seeking tariff or quota protection that have been difficult for the Executive 
to fight off, and which have repeatedly caused embarrassment to it with such 
allies and friends as Japan, Peru, Mexico, Canada, Norway, ete. Fighting for 
protection to fish in the high seas off Latin America the shrimp and tuna indus- 
tries have kept the Department of State in hot water continuously in Latin 
America, and in respect of the whole Law of the Sea on the broad international 
front. Fighting for protection against fishing ground competition from Asian 
and Huropean fishermen in coastal waters of the United States, from Maine to 
Nome, Alaska, has caused continuous embarrassment to the Executive Branch 
of the United States Government in the Congress and with the Foreign Offices 
of affected nations. In these struggles to survive a dichotomy of purpose and 
thrust has developed between the domestic distant water fishermen and the 
coastal fishermen of the United States that has frequently disturbed the govern- 
ment and decreased the political influence of both sorts of fishermen with it, to 
their mutual disadvantage. 
Curious side effects have arisen. By 1955 a marked schism had developed be- 
tween the U.S.-flag fishing industry and the domestic processors that purchased 
their product and marketed it. This has continued to grow. This was particularly 
the case in the ground fish and tuna industries, where the processors and dis- 
tributors became increasingly dependent upon foreign supplies and increasingly 
disinterested in the socio-economic problems of the domestic fishermen. In the 
competitive struggle to keep alive, the processors and distributors centered their 
activities increasingly on their particular problems to the extent that the large 
industries related to fish meal, shrimp, salmon, tuna, and ground fish became in- 
creasingly compartmented away from each other. Decreasing profit and frag- 
mentation of effort diminished the taking of innovative risk and destroyed such 
national representation as the industry had emerged from the war with. Inter- 
action among the fragments became more evident than cooperation. The result 
was that both the Congress and the Executive Branch were increasingly impor- 
tuned by highly specialized interests within the overall industry to attend ‘to 
their specific problems as specialized interests, rather than as national problems 
of importance to large segments or the whole, of United States society. The fishing 
industry as a whole, instead of being an instrument of the society in this field, 
became an annoying, squabbling group of special interests, none of which was 
able to secure the attention of the society or government to the real problems that 
required solution if it was to become a socially useful instrument in this field. 
In the past decade the processors and distributors of fishery products have 
continued to prosper and grow as the internal market for fishery products de- 
veloped. They increasingly have searched for product and raw material to fill 
their needs on a world wide basis. In the past decade this series of branches of 
