national catch quotas will have to be negotiated. 

 While the difficulty of securing international agree- 

 ment on this matter should not be underestimated, 

 there is reason for optimism. The situation in the 

 North Atlantic fisheries is such that each partici- 

 pating nation, and particularly the larger fishing 

 nations, will be able to see, within four to five 

 years, that it wiU be better off, or at least as well 

 off, with the proposed quota system than without 

 it." 



The negotiation of national catch quotas, then, 

 is not an impossible task if each nation realistically 

 compares the catch quota proposed for it with the 

 absolute catch it is likely to realize (and the cost 

 of obtaining it) in the absence of the recom- 

 mended quota system, rather than with what it 

 would like to have. Our confidence that nations 

 will take this reaUstic view is based upon the 

 conviction that the probable alternative to the 

 proposed system will clearly be disastrous for all 

 participants. 



This confidence is buttressed by the experience 

 of the United States and Canada under the 

 International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Convention, 

 where an equal division of the catch, based on no 

 discernible logic, has proved acceptable and work- 

 able simply because the alternative was too un- 

 pleasant to contemplate. It is not shaken by the 

 experience in Antarctic whaling. The difficulty 

 there was not with the informally-negotiated 

 national catch quotas but with the total catch 

 quotas that were set too high. The nations 

 participating in Antarctic whaling came to see time 

 and again that they would be better off with than 

 without national catch quotas. 



Finally, there is no reason why the bargaining 

 over the allocation of national quotas should be 

 confined to the North Atlantic fisheries alone or, 

 for that matter, to fishery matters alone. The 

 range of mutual concessions that might be made to 

 achieve agreement on quotas is broad indeed, and 

 the wider the range of possible trade-offs the 

 greater the possibility of reaching agreement. 



3. Is the Recommendation Enforceable? 



The ICNAF Working Group concluded that 

 national catch quotas did not present insuperable 

 problems of enforcement. Most countries partici- 

 pating in the fisheries in question keep a con- 

 tinuous record of catches by species from different 

 parts of the areas involved. These statistics, of 

 course, are based on what the operators report on 

 their return to port. Once national catch quotas 

 are in effect, these operators will have an incentive 

 to make inaccurate reports as to the amount of 

 fish they caught and where they caught them. To 

 give every participating nation confidence that the 

 quotas are being observed, the panel recommends 

 that a system of international inspection be 

 instituted. An international corps of neutral in- 

 spectors, responsible to and paid by ICNAF, 

 should be created. One such inspector should be 

 stationed at each port of landing and he should 

 not belong to the same nation as the fishing fleet 

 he wUl be assigned to inspect. This inspection 

 effort might be evaded if landings are sought to be 

 made at other than the usual ports, but this is not 

 a likely eventuality because it probably would be 

 uneconomic to do so and it could be easily 

 discovered. 



The problems facing the inspector would be 

 manageable. For cod and haddock landed as wet 

 or whole frozen fish, factors for conversion to Uve 

 weight are available and landed weight is easily 

 ascertainable.*^ Determining the area of origin 

 presents some difficulty. Cod and haddock are 

 landed from areas in the North Atlantic outside 

 the areas in question (principally from the Baltic, 

 the North Sea and west of the British Isles), but 

 the vessels fishing in these outside areas are gen- 

 erally different from those fishing in the areas in 

 question.*'' The same vessels may also fish at 

 Faroes and Iceland or at Faroes and in the North 

 Sea, but cod from Faroes can be identified easily 

 on the market.* ' 



Factory trawlers, handling processed (filleted 

 and frozen) fish present greater problems of 

 establishing the species, the Uve weight, and the 

 area of fishing, though such vessels are most 



It should be recalled that under the recent agreement 

 between the Soviet Union and the United States on 

 Fishery Operations in the Western Mid-Atlantic Ocean, 

 both countries accepted the quota principle by agreeing 

 not to increase their fish catch in the waters in question 

 above the 1967 level. 



63 



Report of Working Group, supra note 46, at 7. 

 "ibid. 



"Ibid. 



VIII-60 



