Focus on coastal communities

THE National Fisheries Authority (NFA) is focusing on coastal communities in the country to develop coastal fishery. NFA deputy managing director Noan Pakop and his team were in Manus last week with staff from other government agencies and bilateral partners to visit fisheries cooperatives in the outer islands of the province. He spoke to The National’s Business reporter Dale Luma on NFA’s aim to develop business opportunities through projects using resources available to local fishermen in order to sustain their livelihoods.

Market survey and project interventions in Manus
We are trying to connect the community’s right up to the market,” Parkop explains.
What are the processes in between?
You have the catching component which is the fishermen, they catch the fish but they need to preserve their fish so that it reaches the market in the best condition to enable continuity in supply and maintain quality so the consumer is happy and the demand continues.
There are some projects or interventions we are looking at like supporting fishery cooperatives, the ability for communities to get themselves together, organised in a formal group so that it is easier for the Government to support community groups rather than individuals.
From the catching aspect you move on to the processing and preservation. That’s when cold storage comes in.
You need a cold storage in the town where all fishermen come together, sell their catch and the catch is either frozen so you expand the lifespan of the product or filleted and processed into the requirement of the markets and exported to major markets within the country.
We are conducting a market survey in the country trying to identify the best markets for fisheries products so we can link fishermen organised in cooperatives to have their products exported to those markets directly.
The shorter the chain is, the more benefits they get and the more value they get out of their fish products.
The initiative has come through fisheries but we have assistance through the Overseas Fisheries Cooperation Foundation (OFCF) in Japan following the broad arrangement we have with Japan to have access to fishing tuna in our waters.
Those are some of the development projects that they do to support the coastal communities. We are talking advantage of that to provide those markets and avenues available to our local fishermen so that they have certainty in the way that when they catch their fish they know that it’s going to be sold.
Another development recently with the opening of the Momote airport, this adds value to the work that we do in fisheries in terms of providing the avenues for Manus fishermen to export their products to the international market.
The next development would be to look at the type of storage facility at the airport that will improve the process of catching to processing to now transporting through airfreighting cargo to either Japan, Australia or whichever market that the connection of the flights can get the products directly to.
Coastal fisheries is about fisheries inshore especially resource that are found generally within three miles and any fisheries associated with the reef and everyday access.
So how do they take advantage of that knowing that that’s a fisheries they participate in throughout their lives?
We try to develop business opportunities out of the resources that are accessible by fishermen on a day to day basis.
It’s not really introducing high technology where you create a gap but just a slight improvement from what they are used to for gradual progression.
So it makes it a lot easier for them to adopt, there are a number of initiatives we are looking at, seaweed fisheries is one fishery that has potential in the coastal areas, the shallow sheltered waters of the island communities so children, women and men can easily participate.
It’s a fishery that is not a perishable product, it’s a dry product so they can be able to store it at the community level to such a quantity that they can be able to ship or to export and sell.
Other programmes include the Fad or Fish Aggregation Device that enables the fish to gather and aggregate around those installations or devices so that fishermen can easily go to those Fads to fish.
It saves them fuel, energy and time to look for fish. They now know that there are fish around the fads, they go there to catch around the fads.
The main objective of the National Fisheries Authority in trying to make an impact, trying to change the lives of the fishing communities and the village situation in general because we now have the ability or rollout some of the programmes some like the cooperative programme.
The cooperative programme works well when the cooperative and the communities work together because they share the responsibility and whatever comes out of that is also shared on an equal basis and it cuts down costs when people cooperate to form cooperative societies based on fisheries.

Market trend
The current trend in the world today in terms of seafood consumption, it’s increasing every year, the demand for seafood.
If we don’t provide the opportunity to the communities, they can’t contribute to the opportunities that this demand creates.
As the world population grows, the demand continues to grow.
We have a lot of resources out in the oceans and the reef areas but our people are not actually participating. It’s through proper policies that will actually tie them into the trend that is happening globally.

Government interventions
Most of the government interventions are better channelled through associations, business groupings, cooperatives, those are recognised well through Government processes.
It’s a bit difficult for the support to go to individuals so that is the purpose for us working with the Department of Commerce and Industry (DCI) through their cooperative arrangements.
We want to encourage a whole of Government approach. We need to work together with DCI, port authorities, Customs and others.
The NFA has done a number of visits around the country and the main purpose behind these visits is that from the endorsement and approval of the National Fisheries strategic plan, there’s a number of key result areas that have to be implemented within 10 years from 2021 to 2030.
In order to implement those key result areas or actions outlined in the plan, there is a need to do the ground work and visit the communities because a number of those are policies relating to communities, provincial government, local level governments and how to connect the work done in fisheries right up to meet the government policies. We have covered the Highlands in relation to fish farming and how it can change the livelihoods such as food security, poverty alleviation and all kind of issues through fisheries.
This time around we have done some of the coastal maritime provinces and especially going down to the communities.
The biggest challenge that I see is isolation. Manus itself is isolated from the main part of the country and therefore infrastructure wise, access to Government services in the rural areas is difficult.
Part of this visit is to see and understand and bring awareness to those communities about what the Government is doing and if it will work well with the situation in the rural areas and also for the government officials to come down right to the community level and be able to relate the policies to the actual situation on the ground.
We did the Ndilou and Hawaii communities, those are island communities that are close to Lorengau town. We came further up to Pak Island, Langenrowa and Liuliu to see the seaweed farming and understand how some of the existing projects by fisheries affected the lives of the people and what are the gaps and challenges to provide intervention.
Fishing in general generates quite a considerable revenue into the country from just the tuna sector alone. We translate that into other sectors of fisheries where people in the island communities or rural communities throughout the country can have access to revenue and transform their lives.