License and Size profiles of Mississippi Seafood and Commercial and Recreational Fishing Sectors

Posadas, Benedict C. and Benedict Kit A. Posadas, Jr. 2013. License and Size Profiles of Mississippi Seafood, and Commercial and Recreational Fishing Sectors. Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station Bulletin 1206, Mississippi State, Mississippi.

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This bulletin is part of the coast-wide assessment of the economic impacts of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (GOMOS) on the State of Mississippi as mandated by the Mississippi Office of the Governor through the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning and the
Mississippi Research Consortium.

This bulletin deals with the license and size profiles of Mississippi seafood and marine-related sectors. The economic sectors included in the analysis are commercial fishing, charter boats for hire, live-bait boats and dealers, and seafood dealers and processors. The overall goal of these profiles is to describe the number of seafood firms and commercial and recreational fishing establishments licensed to operate in Mississippi in 2009–10. These profiles provide snapshots of the levels of effort that these establishments planned to employed in 2009–10 as compared with two baseline periods.

The economic characteristics include the county locations of all sectors and the lengths of vessels and boats of the commercial and recreational fleets.  The distribution by county locations provides the spatial concentrations of these establishments, therefore identifying the counties that might have been heavily impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The county locations include the three Mississippi coastal counties – Hancock, Harrison, and Jackson Counties, other Mississippi counties, and out-of-state counties. The vessel length is reported in feet and is a good indicator of the number of jobs at the vessel level.

The long-term annual databases on commercial licenses sold were compiled from the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (MDMR).  For the purpose of comparison with the Gulf oil spill period, two baseline periods are used in the analysis. The two baseline periods cover the past decade starting from 2000 to 2009.  The pre-Katrina period refers to the five years starting from 2000 to 2004. The post-Katrina period starts from 2005 to 2009. The Gulf oil spill period starts from 2010 up to the present.