| In late 1998, Congress appropriated five million dollars
to NOAA to provide emergency disaster assistance to persons or entities in the Northeast
multispecies fishery who incurred losses from a commercial fishery failure due to declining stocks of groundfish.
The initial round of assistance was directed towards groundfish fishermen most affected by seasonal area closures
enacted during 1999 in the Gulf of Maine. Although about 200 permit holders (owners) received
compensation, the first round of assistance did not exhaust all of the appropriated funds. NOAA Fisheries conducted a
second round of disaster assistance in March 2000, which broadened eligibility requirements to include more affected
fishermen, including crew members. In return for receiving compensation, participants agreed to either make their
vessel available for cooperative research projects, and/or to respond to a survey that would provide sociocultural
and economic information for fishery analysts and fisheries management. A total of 286 owner surveys and 181 crew surveys (representing a response rate
of 78.1% and 75.1% respectively) were received by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. The surveys covered six
broad areas: households and communities; expenditure impacts; business practices; management and enforcement; capacity and the
future; and fishing family assistance. Questions in the survey solicited either specific information, or feedback
for designing future surveys to better meet
the needs of both researchers and stakeholders. In an effort to promote additional avenues for feedback, the following
provides links to the surveys used in the second round of disaster assistance, and summarized results from most of the
survey questions (not including, for example, open-ended questions). Please feel free to examine the surveys and survey results, send comments,
and check back in the future for additional analyses.
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Comments? Please send mail to
julia.olson@noaa.gov
