Pacific Island fisheries firms are seeking joint ventures to tap the Chinese market while adding value to their products.
Tony Sullivan, the investment facilitation manager at the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, brought a delegation of eight small- and medium- sized enterprise (SME) seafood firms from four Pacific island states to the 2018 Seafood Asia Expo in Hong Kong.
“We’re in Hong Kong looking for buyers [and] opportunities where investors might want to be in a joint venture with our companies,” Sullivan told SeafoodSource at the expo.
Currently, many of the joint ventures entered into by FFA partners are, in reality, deals signed by fishing companies and Pacific Island governments in order to access fisheries, Sullivan explained. The kind of joint venture Sullivan’s agency aims to pursue involves creating employment and increasing the socio-economic benefits from the fisheries, he said. Sullivan said investors would ideally help with marketing and distribution and partner with “very skilled” local fishermen.
“Companies want to export and also add more value for their product…These are companies that wouldn’t have the money for a marketing campaign [in the greater China region],” Sullivan told SeafoodSource. Key markets being sought out include China, said Sullivan.
Tuna fishing is a top industry for the nations belonging to the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), which jointly oversees the management of fishing of four key tuna species – albacore, big eye, skipjack and bluefin – over a wide spread of the Pacific Ocean. The PNA currently charges distant-water purse seiner and long line vessels from China, South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries on a per-day basis for access to its waters.
Most of the canneries and loineries (facilities where the tuna is split into loins) processing Pacific-caught tuna are in large part controlled by big Thai, Filipino, and Chinese firms, which prefer to process outside in the Pacific Islands region. The high cost of utilities – in particular electricity – has turned many processors off setting up operations in the Pacific Islands, with most preferring to ship the tuna directly to plants in their home countries.
Photo courtesy of Pacific Islands Oceanic Fisheries Management
