CONSERVATION OF TROPICAL TUNA THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 1962 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTER-AMERICAN AFFAIRS, Washington, D.C. The Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs met, pursuant to call, at 10:50 a.m., in room G-3, U.S. Capitol, Hon. Armistead I. Selden, Jr. (chairman of the subcommittee), presiding. Mr. SELDEN. The meeting will come to order, please. We have with us this morning Mr. Charles R. Carry, executive director of the California Fish Canners Association, and he is accompanied by Mr. George E. Steele, Jr., of the National Canners Association. We are meeting to discuss S. 2568, a bill to amend the Tuna Conventions Act of 1950, and an amendment proposed by Mr. August Felando, representing the American Tunaboat Association. Mr. Carry, we will be glad to hear from you, sir. STATEMENT OF CHARLES R. CARRY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CALIFORNIA FISH CANNERS ASSOCIATION Mr. CARRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I might start out by requesting, which I have already done by letter, that the lengthy statement I submitted to you be included in the record at this point or some other appropriate place. Mr. SELDEN. Your prepared statement has already been included in the record. (See p. 23.) Mr. CARRY. Mr. Chairman, I think you know I didn't want to come to Washington to testify. Nobody ever does. But this was a particularly difficult time for me. However, Mr. Steele advised that your staff and some of the members of the committee had requested that somebody representing the canners come here to express their views. Consequently, in order to cooperate fully with your committee, I came in night before last, flew all night to get here, and spent part of yesterday trying to review this proposed amendment. But frankly we have not had enough time to study it very carefully. However, we do have some views on it. I do not have a prepared statement. I have just some notes which will serve as a basis for my remarks. Before getting to the question Mr. SELDEN. We asked you to come and testify because we felt that certainly your group would be tremendously interested in this legislation. We also felt that time was of the essence if this legislation is to be considered before adjournment, since we are in the closing weeks of the session. Consequently, we set up this hearing and requested that someone from your group come as soon as possible. Mr. CARRY. I am aware of that. I am very much aware of the time element. That is why in one of my communications to you setting forth the position of my organization in favor of this legislation I suggested it might not be necessary to have a hearing since at that stage of the game we were all in agreement on the legislation as passed by the Senate. I am sure you have been aware of that. I regret very much that we may have seemed to have misled you. It was not our intention to do so. Before discussing the amendment I would like to make a few brief points with respect to the legislation itself. First of all, failure to enact S. 2568 in some form will have the following effects: (1) It will be a repudiation of the commitments made when the convention was negotiated back in 1949. Incidentally, I was one of the advisers to the U.S. delegation at the time that the convention was negotiated. (2) On the broad international scene it will make a mockery of all our statements about conservation at every international fishery conference or law of the sea conference and so forth, in which the United States has participated. This is particularly true, by the way, in connection with shrimp, salmon, and other fisheries that are subject to international conventions at this time. (3) In the same connection it will be a violation of the 1958 Geneva Convention which the United States has ratified and under which all states have the obligation to conserve fishery resources. (4) Failure to enact the legislation in view of the above will provide an excuse for Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and other Latin American countries to enact restrictive decrees such as the present Ecuadoran decree. However, they will do it on the basis of the 1958 Geneva Convention, using conservation as the pretext. We canners are not only sympathetic with Mr. Felando's objectives, but our objectives are exactly the same. Of the 145 boats in the tuna fleet, only 66 belong to the Tunaboat Association. A substantial number, and I don't have the total with me, are canner owned. These boats for the most part are not members of the Tunaboat Association for reasons that have to do with the marketing activities of the association. Canners are no different than any other boatowners. The White Star, about which there has been a considerable amount of discussion is owned by a canner, the Van Camp Sea Food Co. That company has exerted every possible effort to get the boat released, every effort consistent with their obligations to the United States. They have worked through the appropriate agencies of the Government to get this accomplished. As far as I know, the boat is not officially released, although we did have a report yesterday, that we are still trying to confirm, that the boat is out fishing but has an armed guard aboard. We have told Mr. Felando from the beginning that we would join with his organization and all others in the industry, in an effort to seek a solution to the problem of seizures. Mr. Felando's quarrel, we feel, is with Public Law 680, 83d Congress, known as the Fishermen's Protective Act, not with S. 2568. We believe Public Law 680 should be amended to provide more adequate compensation to a boatowner whose vessel is seized than the mere remission of any fine levied. We believe a boatowner should be compensated for the fishing time he loses or for any fish that is confiscated or spoils because the boat is detained. We believe also that he should be compensated for any net or other equipment that is confiscated. Actually, Mr. Chairman, we have tried several times in the past to have Public Law 680 amended to give boatowners this additional protection but have not been successful. Perhaps if your subcommittee gave the necessary study to this problem, we might have some better success. The proposed amendment is not a solution to the problem of seizures for the following reasons, and is unacceptable to us: (a) Mr. Felando has now reversed the position he took as recently as July 16 when the Senate passed S. 2568. This is not important although, with the exception of the seizure of the White Star, which we understand may now be fishing again, conditions are no different than they were in June or July when the Senate passed the bill. (b) The amendment is badly drafted and would require complete revision to put it into a form any official could understand. For example, should the Secretary of the Interior enforce the embargo, or should the Secretary of the Treasury through the Bureau of the Customs? Normally embargoes are handled by Customs. What is the meaning of "lawful" manner? Whose laws ours or the other government? What are the "high seas" or, stated in reverse, what are the "territorial_seas" of the nation making the seizure or doing the "harassing"? Does our interpretation control or does the other government's? Is there any way of adjudicating this point? Can we get any country with which we have a controversy into the International Court of Justice? I don't think so. (c) The amendment would be effective against only 2 or at most 3 of the 11 countries bordering the eastern Pacific. There are 11 countries that potentially could seize or could harass tunaboats running all the way from Mexico to Chile. I have a tabulation I will leave with the reporter, if you wish, and I will read the figures showing just exactly how much fish would be embargoed from any country or would have been embargoed against any country in past years. You have heard a lot about this El Salvador seizure. Mr. Guidi told you a shocking story about what happened to him. We don't believe that this should happen to any citizen. What would an embargo do to El Salvador? Not a thing. They haven't sold a pound of tuna in the United States in history. They are not likely to in the foreseeable future. What about some of the other countries? Colombia-they haven't sold a pound of tuna to the United States. I have checked this from the FT-110 reports published by the Bureau of the Census. They haven't sold a pound of tuna in any form to the United States in the past 5 years. Costa Rica, for example, is another country on the coast. In 1960 Costa Rica sent us a mere 660,000 pounds of fresh and frozen tuna. Panama sent us 1,113,000 pounds in 1959; 661,000 pounds in 1960. The only two countries really that could be hurt by an embargo are Peru and Ecuador. They have sold us fairly substantial quantities of tuna, although in the overall picture I don't know whether they would consider the dollar value involved here as being as significant as we think it would be. Mexico is in the same position. Mexico sells us some tuna. The quantities are small. In 1957 they sent in 414,000 pounds; in 1958, 312 million pounds; in 1959, 5 million pounds; in 1960, 4 million pounds; and in 1961, 212 million pounds. (The table on tuna imports is as follows:) Fresh Canned and Canned and Canned and Canned and Canned and frozen frozen frozen frozen frozen Mr. CARRY. It seems to me, therefore, that since only possibly two or at most three countries would feel the effect of an embargo, this is not the way to handle this problem. Furthermore, this bill is a conservation bill. We would like to keep it a conservation bill and not involve other problems in the field of conservation. The bill is complicated enough as it is. It is almost an impossible bill to enforce. It can be enforced but any further amendment will make it just that much more difficult. We are wondering, as a matter of fact, whether this harassing and seizing really has any implication with respect to conservation. We certainly don't condone the seizures or harassing. In fact, we condemn them just as bitterly as anybody else. We don't see that this proposed embargo belongs in a conservation measure. Yesterday it was brought to our attention that section 620 (e) of the Act for International Development might provide a more effective means of handling the seizure problem than would this proposed amendment. Frankly, we haven't had time even to study that possibility. We don't know. We haven't had time to take it up with any of the legal people who would know something about it. But it presents a possibility. My members are opposed to the amendment on other grounds, too. The effects of these embargoes will actually fall directly on two, three, or possibly on all of our southern California canners. There are 10 companies in all. They will be the principal victims of any embargo of this kind. As a matter of fact, we can see the possibility that this embargo, if it should become law, could be used by a skipper as a means of wreaking vengeance on one of our members if he happened to be angry about some fancied wrong done him by the canner. There is no great risk |