Fisheries committee  Mr. Chair, I want to start by thanking you for giving me the opportunity to share some of our work and the work of colleagues around the world on marine protected areas. I specialize in the economics of the oceans and fisheries. We develop bioeconomics models. We do evaluations.

Fisheries committee  Commercial industrial fishing, yes, I actually see movement around the world toward that, and there is a lot of discussion these days about small-scale fisheries versus industrial large-scale fisheries. This point you are making is coming up again and again. Why is this so? Whe

Fisheries committee  Okay. From what I am seeing in the international arena, yes, there is a push toward more small-scale, community-based fisheries that serve the communities more.

Fisheries committee  No, I was talking about displacing fishing efforts in the fishing area.

Fisheries committee  Not necessarily.

Fisheries committee  In the short term, and I made it clear, you may need to cut effort, and cutting effort, everything being equal, will involve some people. But in the medium term and long term.... This is the thing—the economist doesn't just look at today. If you did that, you would never save for

Fisheries committee  The key thing is whether the activity impacts the ecosystem or the fishery. Catch and release is better than catch and take home, but we also know that there's mortality involved with that.

Fisheries committee  Yes. There is that, if you can live with that, and maybe that's okay, but it depends on the objective, as he said.

Fisheries committee  [Inaudible—Editor]

Fisheries committee  It's like any investment program. When you are in serious imbalance, like we are with the fisheries, we need to take drastic action. Drastic action means that society has to be willing to invest, one way or the other, in order to get us back in balance. Our analysis is showing t

Fisheries committee  Very good. Also, regarding the last question about the numbers, we have actually calculated numbers for the impact of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. We did calculations for the northern gateway to see what would happen to the fishing revenues and so on, if we had oil spills.

Fisheries committee  About three or four years ago, I gave a talk in California. There were tech people there. When I finished my talk, I was asked a question by a young guy who said, “Rashid, what can we do in Silicon Valley to help you guys sustain our futures?” I told him, “Create an app that will

Fisheries committee  Actually, it hasn't impacted their local food source, because local, small-scale community fisheries still go on. It's the big industrial fishing they took out. They were simply catching the fish, shipping it out, and selling it to Japan and so on. That was that. They lost some r

Fisheries committee  You know, it's very funny, because the main industrial fishing was for tuna, and they weren't eating much of that at all.

Fisheries committee  Oh, in Japan, yes, that's another question. They will probably go somewhere else or eat something else. These days we have a lot of sushi fixes and sushi stuff coming up, because tuna is going, and with California rolls and so on—I've been to Tokyo, and it's happening in Japan to