Summary

Description

DFW collects `trip ticket? or `purchase invoice? data from vendors that buy fish directly from the fishermen. Similar to other trip ticket invoice systems, except that compliance is voluntary and invoices are only provided to dealers, hotel, stores, fish mobiles etc. on the island of Saipan. Participation has deteriorated in recent years as the economy has suffered and businesses have failed and struggled to stay in existence. DFW has always run the system and have efforts underway to improve compliance and actually make such commercial vendor reporting mandatory through local legislation (although this has been tried in the past and failed). Data are collected by vendor and may include a fishermen?s identity (or not) and include number of pieces, weight, and price for some individual species and some species groups. Data exist back to about 1983 and are continuing, although the relative coverage of the fisheries has varied over the time series. These data are considered highly confidential.