Mr. DYSON. Yes, it is. It is just in the last 2 years, I understand, that the Koreans have mounted a fishing effort. We are not only afraid of the Koreans but the North Koreans and Cubans and Red China, all these nations who are unfriendly to us are not going to sit down and do any bargaining with us, they are going to catch our fish and go away laughing about it because they have depleted our fishery and still have their own. The Coast Guard has just got to be up to the job of seeing they don't do this along with good laws and regulations from our Congress.

Senator YOUNG. You feel then that the Coast Guard in this area should probably be doubled, and the equipment, the boats and the airplanes, greatly increased in quantity?

Mr. DYSON. Yes. I think doubling would not be enough because they have done the job that had to be done. I don't know how they have done so well with the equipment and personnel they have. I think more than double. They only have two obsolete icebreakers that are not long-range, all-weather ships. I think we need many, many more to do the job. As this oil becomes developed and has to go to the market, there will be a great need for icebreakers to control this thing. We have the Stores and I guess East Wind and North Wind which are relatively small, inefficient vessels in this kind of a job that they must do.

Senator YOUNG. Is it your thought that if the South Koreans meet with some degree of success because of their intrusion that perhaps the North Koreans will then take a whirl at it?

Mr. DYSON. I am certain of that, Senator. I am certain that the Japanese and other nations who are sitting by with the treaty are going to take a dim view of watching some other nation come in and catch the fish that they have agreed not to catch. There is no better way to deplete a resource than to catch it out in the breeding grounds where they have not got the control to go into the parent stream.

Senator GRAVEL. If I could interrupt at that point, Senator.

Of course the Koreans have not gotten off scott free. The Senate this last week did a very unusual thing in that they passed the amendment that was introduced by Senator Stevens and myself to punish the Korean intruders by denying them any amount of foreign aid. The reaction that we received from the Korean Government is evidence of the fact that they will cut down when we really strike them in an area that they cannot stand suspended.

Senator YOUNG. That was a fine decision. In other words, that may cut it short right at the source.

Senator GRAVEL. I think so. I think the fact that it was a voice vote in the Senate rather than a rollcall vote gave it greater strength from the Government's point of view. They got the

message.

Mr. DYSON. We are happy to see the action that the Senate has taken. It has given us a lot of courage.

Senator YOUNG. The present Coast Guard, however, detected the Koreans and they did their utmost on behalf of our fisheries, did they not?

Mr. DYSON. Yes, certainly, with the equipment they have. They just don't know how long they will be able to do this job. They have had some wonderful personnel. Three or four planes and five or six old boats, it just is astonishing how they got that job done.

Senator YOUNG. Just one other thing. You made mention of Cuba. You don't really mean that Cuba comes over here?

Mr. DYSON. Well, not really; just that any nation that is not friendly with us might mount a fishing effort just for harassment or to deplete our fishery. This is, of course, what we are kind of up against.

Senator YOUNG. Well, it could not be Cuba; it might be Ecuador or some of these other countries in South America.

Mr. DYSON. Yes.

Senator YOUNG. No other questions.

Senator GRAVEL. Very good.

Senator Jordan.

Senator JORDAN. Mr. Dyson, I have enjoyed your testimony. I thoroughly agree with your'statement. I think a great deal of the Coast Guard because that service has some very fine installations in North Carolina. I keep referring to my own State, but we have them and I know a great deal about them and I know what a grand job they are doing.

I thoroughly agree with you that they don't have the equipment they need, that they ought to have, and I want to help get it for them. I was delighted to support this resolution that passed the Senate. If we would just do a little bit more of that in some of these other places where we have problems with people that break our laws or infringe on our territory, they would be less apt to do it.

Senator GRAVEL. Thank you, Senator.

Senator Cook.

Senator Cook. Mr. Dyson, I want to thank you for some of the remarks you made. I wish to reiterate that hopefully the surveillance and search and rescue functions of the Coast Guard will not become subordinated to oceanographic research.

I must reveal that I testified against the 200-meter rule before the Special Subcommittee on the Outer Continental Shelf. My position. resulted from the apprehension that the 200-meter rule would create more problems for the fishing industry than it would solve, particularly on the Continental Shelf.

Mr. DYSON. Certainly in the last 25 years that I have been a fisherman I have seen the problems many times double. As a commercial fisherman I supported, and I still do, the Continental Shelf policy but we know of no other way that we can get our fisheries protected. I guess the fishing interest that is so diversified in every area has certain problems. Though we have not been able to get a united working group that would be able to be enough to go down and get the things to do the job that the Continental Shelf would do for us, I think that sometime if it was shown to us why some other laws would protect our stock then we would gladly accept it, but we don't know of any.

For us to draw a line out there that depletes the stock instead of protecting it makes no sense. To wait to get some kind of laws that would say that international agreements, which Lord, we have not had very many of in these international agreements in the last 25 years, I think they are very, very few if you sat back and looked on the successful ones that I say would really protect our stock.

The United States as a whole, as I see it, has not taken a strong position on their fisheries because we have gone down the drain from

No. 2 to No. 6 where 65 to 70 percent of our fishery stocks is being imported. Now this is a fantastic, shocking situation. Any time that we could get some laws that would change it, why we would be off the hook.

Senator Cook. Mr. Dyson, my contention is that if the 200-meter line is internationalized and is subjected to international bids and contracts, the United States, which ranks sixth in fishing, would not be in a strong competitive position and might suffer an additional decline in fishing prominence. What do you think of the proposal? Mr. DYSON. About internationalizingSenator Cook. The 200-meter level.

Mr. DYSON. I am only thinking of myself as a fisherman, and as to being a fisherman for 25 years I don't think it has much chance. It just seems as though the other nations put more importance on their fisheries. We seem to want to "wheel and deal" with them and develop other people's fisheries and not our own. I don't think we would have much success in internationalizing to the degree that we would need to. That is only my personal opinion.

Senator Cook. Are you in essence saying that to internationalize the 200-meter line would be a mistake?

Mr. DYSON. That is what I think. I think we are not in a position to have the real strong feeling that, say, Japan or Russia or other nations have. I have been on some of these negotiations and, man, they are pretty effective with their presentations and the stand that they have. They just come right out and say they are not going to take our point of view and that is all there is to it.

Senator COOK. Thank you.

Senator JORDAN. Mr. Chairman, the other thing is that some of our negotiators think a lot more about everybody else than they do about our own people. I suggest we ought to set up an American desk in our State Department, I don't think we have one right now. They seem worried about everybody but us; I agree with you on that.

Senator Cook. Thank you.

Senator GRAVEL. That is a very fine suggestion.

Senator Stevens just said we unfortunately let our internationalists do our negotiating for us.

Mr. DYSON. I agree with you.

Senator STEVENS. Some of our negotiating force have done a fine job. I cut my legal teeth, you might say, defending the American Tuna Boat Association in the early fifties when they first started seizing those vessels off South America. You recall that.

Senator JORDAN. Very well I do.

Senator STEVENS. They were insisting on 200 miles and we were insisting on 300 miles.

Let me ask you this. Mike and I are on that subcommittee and we are fighting like the devil to turn this thing around but we were not successful in approaching this thing from a total shelf point of view. Is there any other way in your opinion that we could develop a comcept other than the meter depth? What I am talking about is the distance factors. Do you have a distance factor that if we had measured it from the U.S. position it would sufficiently protect the Alaska fishing resources?

Mr. DYSON. I really don't believe anything will take its place, but of course the straight base line concept of the fishery agreement

would be a tremendous benefit to us, it would extend our lines out a considerable distance. This is what we hope and ask for, and I think it is probably a chance that we would get.

Another thing that would help us tremendously, of course imports is one thing that is really killing us. First we cannot compete with the cheap cost of labor and the cost of living standards of other nations and the amount of subsidy that they are getting from their government. So this is a bad word, I know. Any time you start knocking imports around why you are stepping on a lot of people's toes. But sooner or later we have to find some way to get back the markets that we once had.

I don't know the answers but I just know that sooner or later something has to be done or there is going to be no independent fishermen in this country. We are on our last leg rolling with the punches to find ways to keep in existence.

Senator STEVENS. The word "tariff" is not foreign to my Vocabulary.

You mentioned the North Koreans and Red Chinese, and we know that they are building fishing fleets. We have had the leverage on Koreans for a long time, thought we had the leverage on them because of the economic and military assistance we gave them.

We don't have any leverage on those Communist countries short of a gunboat diplomacy, and you have been on some of these international negotiations. What do you see? Have we got any other answer other than just strictly using this South American approach? Let's put it that way.

Mr. DYSON. Well, Ted, I wish I did. I think that we just have to realize the importance of fishery stocks to the United States and just go from there, get a tough attitude and work on legislation, bills that would alleviate the fishery from the problems which we know are going to happen.

We just got an example of this. The United States found out what the Russians and the Japanese did with thousands of vessels coming into a real fishery and in a matter of a year or two they have depleted the fishing grounds, left the coastal States dependent on an influx of fish coming in and working on a depleted stock.

Senator STEVENS. What was that species that was absolutely destroyed by the Russians out here?

Mr. DYSON. Halibut, crab. They say they are not, but the drag here is not selective.

Senator STEVENS. Why not explain to our friends-and you have two real strong friends on the other end, and I know Marlow also-the effect of this gear that they use and what it does to the crab pots, what it does to our conservation process that we insist on that they are not using?

Mr. DYSON. Well, Ted, this is kind of a complex question. Here some 7 or 8 years ago, I believe it was, the Russians got so bad on our gear, they come crawling-crab gear is fixed to the buoy with a line, it is not movable. Along comes a fleet of Russian draggers and they happen to decide they want to fish this same area. They go down to the drag and chop off our lines and buoys. It cost $300 for line and buoys plus the fishing effort you have lost.

So we got up in arms, and we say thanks to the Government, they were able to make agreements that there would be certain areas

in the coastal line that they would stop fishing at certain times. This has been quite successful. This is not necessarily what we really hoped for but it shows that if we can muster a strong protest in an effort to get around these things, they have done it. This is only in the Kodiak area. The Chain and the Dutch area and other areas they have not as yet spelled out quite so plain.

I think only through the Continental Shelf theory or through the straight base line can we hope to still keep these people out. I was on the negotiations with the State Department who made these original first agreements, and it is hard to get these people to accept your point of view; they just can't see it. The fish are out there and their job is to catch them. They don't use very much competition especially when they are working on the other country's stock.

Senator STEVENS. Thank you.

Senator GRAVEL. Thank you, Oscar. We will see you later on this afternoon.

Mr. DYSON. Yes. Thank you. It has been a pleasure to be able to come and say my piece.

Senator GRAVEL. We are right on schedule.

Now I would like to call on Rear Adm. Robert E. Hammond.
Admiral, it is a pleasure seeing you.

STATEMENT OF REAR ADM. ROBERT E. HAMMOND, COMMANDER, 17th COAST GUARD DISTRICT, JUNEAU, ALASKA

Admiral HAMMOND. Senator, I didn't come with a prepared statement. I was not exactly certain what the coverage was going to be at this hearing.

I would like to open my remarks by saying that I have been in Alaska on two different occasions for a total of 4 years and just left, having been district commander for the past 2 years. I feel that as well as from the standpoint of myself in Alaska and in the Coast Guard I was a private citizen and a taxpayer. I feel Alaska is one of the most important States in the United States and that its future development and protection of the tremendous resources in Alaska of all types is of the utmost importance to the United States as a whole.

We didn't get the commission to the Coast Guard in Alaska, they include many protection of the resource type duties, the ones we listened to in comments from other witnesses. Certainly the fisheries patrol that we are committed to in Alaska I think is extremely important. We have seen the stocks of various fish depleted or reduced to a level that will not support a fishing fleet for king crabs. We have had years from salmon runs where it was so low the canneries could not continue to operate. All of this is attributed to natural disasters in certain cases but certainly it can be attributed to the large intrusion of foreign fishing fleets into waters which hold Alaskan fish. We have foreign fishing fleets of over 600 vessels operating for a good part of the year and fleets of lesser numbers operating a full year. I think you can understand the fishery resources just cannot be maintained.

There are other fisheries in Alaska which the United States does not even harvest, some of the bottom fish, pollock and others considered to be trash fish by United States standards but still they would provide a tremendous amount of protein. They would provide the diet