1149 
Fisheries Commission which do not permit the catching of any except incidental 
halibut by otter-trawl. 
6. A very large Russian fleet of largp trawlers moved into the coastal area where 
the Americans fished off Oregon and Washington in 1966 and in the first year of 
almost experimental fishing caught about 300 million pounds of fish against their 
75 or so million. Adding insult to injury the press and the public immediately 
assumed the Oregon and Washington trawlers to be hopelessly incompetent, 
inefficient and backward because they did not have large vessels like the Russians. 
The truth was, as noted further below, they could not afford to have operated as 
large a trawler as the smallest Russian vessel in their fishery if it were given to 
them, and in catch per man hour, ship-ton, or other measures they were far more 
efficient than the Russians. They just did not have market for what they could 
catch, or much support and comfort from their own government. 
Quite aside from 'the general uproar they cause politically these otter trawlers 
of the Pacific Northwest and New England are the vociferous exponents of 
declaring the fishery limits of the United States to be co-extensive with the con- 
tinental shelf, or 200 miles broad whichever is greater. This would not necessarily 
have any beneficial effect on their market or economics, but it would get the 
Canadian, European, and Asiatic fishermen out of their remaining accustomed 
fishing grounds, and out of sight. This would be satisfaction enough for most 
U.S. flag otter-trawlers. The impact of this on the military posture of the United. 
States (as noted below) could be considerable, and adverse. 
It is obviously confusing to try and discuss in one brief space and at the same 
time, the general problems of the New England and Pacific Northwest trawl 
fishermen; flounder, ocean perch, cod, haddock, scallop, and hake resource prob- 
lems; import policies of the United States; foreign aid policies; subsidies in 
other countries; the flow of ground fish into several parts of the United States 
fish market. 
The trouble is that all of these things are inter-tied with the trawl fisheries 
and cannot be separated out and dealt with in neat units. 
The statistics of the flounder fisheries, which reflect generally increased land- 
ings and values, also partially hide the most painful running sores of the United 
States flag fishing industry because flounder are caught by the ground fish 
fisheries which are the worst off of the United States flag fisheries generally. A 
ray of hope is the presently booming shrimp and scallop fishery of the Gulf of 
Alaska which may give strength to the trawl fishery in that region needed to 
spark production from other very large ground fish resources available in the 
region and fishes substantially now only by Russian and Japanese trawlers. 
(15) Discarded fish.—The most productive fishery of the United States, well 
larger than menhaden, is for fish that are discarded at sea and never brought to 
port. It is reckoned that these discarded amount to at least 1,300 million pounds 
in the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery alone. A substantial amount arises from most 
of the trawl] fisheries elsewhere around the rim of the country. Nearly all of this 
fish dies when returned to the sea. Intensive effort is required to turn this major 
waste into economic use. 
(16) General Comments Arising from a Consideration of Specific Fisherics.— 
In the above discussion brief attention is paid to fifteen of the principal fisheries 
composing a substantial part of the value and volume of U.S. flag landings. The 
purpose has been not to be comprehensive but to illustrate that the statistical 
stagnancy of the U.S. fisheries over the past thirty years is satistical and not real. 
A blanket statistical approach to this subject merely cloaks from view a great 
variety of dynamic situations, most of them having quite different origins, and 
a large number of compiex problems requiring, for the most part, slightly or quite 
different solutions. 
If nine of these resources (Pacific sardine, menhaden, Pacific salmon, cod, 
haddock, Atlantic perch, jack mackerel, Pacific mackerel and oysters) were pro- 
duced at the peak point that they ever reached (a thing not possible on a sus- 
tainable level) the annual catch from these alone woud be 5,892 million pounds: 
(or greater than the annual average catch for all U.S. fisheries over the past 30 
years). In matter of fact these nine resources produced less than half that amount 
in 1967. Between these two levels proper management of the use of the resources: 
could at least have kept them producing at a much higher level than they do today. 
Furthermore there is no pattern to the time at which the peak in these major 
crops were taken. Cod and oyster production were at their recorded peak of 
U.S. production in 1880 when the first U.S. fishery census was taken. Pacific 
