1146 
kept on quotas by the processors in relation to the amount of product that can 
be sold in this rather limited flounder market at existing prices. 
Nevertheless the market for flounder and the landings of this commodity 
continues to grow. 'The value of the catch continued to grow until recently. It will 
be noted from Tables 2 and 3 that the record volume of landings, and value as 
well, was in 1965. The volume was a little down in 1966 but the value was up 
to a new record. The volume in both years was well above the five years (1960— 
64) average. Flounder is in about seventh place in respect of volume and eighth 
place in value among U.S. flag fish landings. The long range outlook is for a steady 
increase in both volume and value, although catch and volume was down again 
in 1967. 
In spite of what would look on the surface to be a reasonably satisfactory con- 
dition of growth in both volume and value in the flounder fishery it is from pre- 
cisely the trawl fisheries that produce flounder as well as other groundfish in 
New England, Oregon and Washington whence comes the most vigorous and 
steady political complaints about their sorry lot. It is the trawl fishery which 
mostly forms the basis for judging that the United States flag fishery is decadent, 
declining, and composed of overaged, inefficient, obsolete vessels and men. It is 
this fishery whence comes the vigorous and continuing political whine that the 
Russians are catching up all their fish and crowding them off their own fishing 
grounds. 
The reason for this anomaly are not hard to find but they are in somewhat 
different quarters than the complaints illuminate. 
Fiounders are produced by otter trawls, the same gear (and kind of vessels) 
that produce cod, hake, haddock, pollack, ocean perch, and most of the other 
numerous sorts of ground fish. As noted above it is precisely this conglomeration 
of fish which has come to form the raw material for the most rapidly growing 
edible fish commodity in the world—the frozen fish block from which is made fish 
sticks, portions, sandwiches, chips, etc. The drive for building this market, and 
its technology, originated in the United States. It is in the United States that the 
market for this sort of fishery product has grown so rapidly in recent years, having 
come from 256 million pounds in 1948 to 576 million pounds in 1966. In fishermen’s 
terms (round weight at the dock) this increase has been from about 850 million 
pounds in 1948 to 1,900 million pounds in 1966. The raw material required for 
this trade in the United States alone exceeded in 1966 even the catch of menhaden 
for fish meal. In 1967 both market and use were down slightly from 1966 records, 
but are going up again in 1968. 
These otter trawlers, as a group, have not participated in the market growth for 
this product. Their share of that market was 74% in 1948, 44% in 1957, and 
30% in 1967. It is just precisely the sorts of fish that fill this market that they are 
able to catch on the grounds where they now fish, or where they did fish in the 
experience of the men still active in the fieet. Their government scientists tell 
them quite truthfully that there are resources available in coastal waters of the 
United States and Canada, which they are accustomed to fishing adequate to 
not only fill this market completely but to provide a substantial surplus for ex- 
port, and they know this. Their processor customers tell them that if they will 
produce fish from which good quality fish blocks can be made at competitive 
prices with imports (say 25¢ per pound) they will buy from them. These otter- 
trawlers cannot do this profitably so they have had to shrink back to the pro- 
duction of higher value flounders rather than grow into this fabulously growing 
new market in their own home country. Even flounder resource abundance 
problems are appearing in New England the last two or three years. 
The New England otter trawlers at the end of World War II were the 
strongest and most vigorously growing branch of the United States flag fishing 
industry. United States Government policy reduced them deliberately to a posi- 
tion of economic weakness and shrinking in a very few years. It did this by 
making the United States market freely and purposely open to ground fish from 
other North Atlantic countries (particularly Canada and Scandinavia) to in- 
crease their dollar earning capabilities. The policy was enunciated by the Presi- 
dent of the United States who, after the otter-trawlers of New England had 
exhausted remedies available to them under law and won their case, overruled 
the U.S. Tariff Commission ruling on the grounds of supervening national interest 
which existed at that time. 
The effect of this has been to shrink the geographic range of the New England 
ground fisheries back from the entire Northwest Atlantic pretty well to George’s 
Bank off Massachusetts and to inshore waters, to remove the economic possibility 
