Fisheries has potential to generate funding, create jobs: Golding

By PETER ESILA
FISHERIES will still be the industry to talk about post-Apec, says chairman of Apec Secretariat Wayne Golding.
He said this during an Abac breakfast update meeting in Port Moresby last week.
“Over the last two weeks, there are articles in the papers that say, ‘we lack foreign exchange, we lack employment opportunities’,” Golding said.
“There is one industry that is going to achieve that in two years and that is the fisheries industries.”
Golding, who gave the outcome of the Abac Food Security Summit held in August, said fisheries had the potential of generating an extra US$1 billion (K3.3 billion) a year.
“It has the opportunity to engage with employment, with a multiple factor of three to one which basically gives us a yield of a quarter of a million people additionally to what is being used in the fishing industry,”he said.
“It is in your backyard: We own it. Sixty per cent of tuna in this region comes out of our own waters, or managed waters, the archipelago.
“While fisheries in this world will never catch up to demand, what we have is a diminishing supply chain against demand for wild fisheries.”
He said the world was moving towards aquaculture fisheries and PNG must put it in added value.