Wayne Gilchrest: “Mr. Speaker, I think this has been a very positive exercise for this body, the House of Representatives, to go through…”

“Mr. Speaker, I think this has been a very positive exercise for this body, the House of Representatives, to go through and understand the nature and importance of the marine ecosystems, the world's oceans and especially the coastal waters of the United States in order to sustain the fishing stock which is necessary for so many livelihoods and so many people that depend on that type of food source. There are three very important elements that I think have occurred in this legislation that survived in the House, that survived in the Senate, and that survived in the conference. Those three very important provisions are the habitat provisions, the bycatch provisions and the optimum yield provisions. The habitat provision. If we did not include those into the legislation, even if we had all of the best regulations concerning the coastal fisheries possible, we could still lose, without protecting the habitat where the fish spawn, 75 percent of the commercial caught fish. We have solved that problem. The next one, if we are going to have some type of efficiency built into the bycatch provision, if we do not have some type of protection built into the bycatch provision, we were catching and throwing away 10 fish for every targeted fish we were keeping. So the bycatch provisions in this legislation practically eliminates that and works to bringing that down to zero.”