Alaska Crab Economic Data Report Data Validation
Dave Colpo
Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission
[email protected]
The North Pacific Fishery Management Council developed the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands (BSAI) Crab Rationalization Program over a 6-year period to accommodate the specific dynamics and needs of the BSAI crab fisheries. The BSAI Crab Rationalization Program is comprised of a number of novel aspects, and the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council (Council) is interested in ensuring that it will be able to adequately assess the impact of the Program on affected parties. Existing data collection programs do not provide the employment, cost and sales data necessary to understand the economic performance of crab fishermen and processors, let alone to determine how this performance has changed after rationalization, or what aspects of these changes are specifically attributable to crab rationalization. Therefore, the Council has recommended that a mandatory economic data collection program be developed. This data collection program will substantially reduce the analytical difficulties that were encountered when attempting to examine the effects of the halibut/sablefish IFQ program and the American Fisheries Act.
The Council has expressed a desire to monitor, among other things, how the economic returns of various stakeholders in BSAI crab fisheries are affected by rationalization. This requires the collection of historic data as well as annual data to not only better understand the economic performance of crab fishery participants, but to isolate the effects attributable to the Program. Economic data reports (EDRs) that ask questions about harvesters' and processors' crab operations were specifically developed for the crab fisheries to fill this knowledge gap.
