Governor opens K10m fish market

PORT Moresby’s K10 million one-stop fish market was officially opened yesterday by NCD Governor Powes Parkop.
The event also coincided with the opening of the Puma Energy fuel station which will serve the fishermen.
Parkop said it took 10 years for the market to be built and acknowledged the partners and stakeholders who worked together to make it possible.
“I’m pleased that we are finally having this facility exclusively for fishermen in and around our city,” Parkop said.
“They have been contributing to the economy, to the livelihood and we have been thinking about it for a long time and eventually we are making it happen.
“It’s another milestone in our collective achievement for the city in the last four years.
“I want to acknowledge the prime minister and National Executive Council for supporting our plans and initiative in our city and this is part of it.
“Funding is coming from National Fisheries Authority (NFA), from national government. But it’s based on our plan and we’ve delivered on budget and on time.
Managing director John Kasu said NFA was privileged to be partnering with NCDC to provide the K10m funding for the market.
“It’s one of our important programmes that we have, not only here but across the country in building important infrastructure for our people,” Kasu said.
“We have opened in Madang and we have this programme that we have with JICA and the next one to come on board is the Alotau market.
“We’re involved in a lot of the other fish markets, basically having established a facility like this where we have our small fishermen coming in. It’s a one-stop facility where they come in and sell their fish and at the same time collect fuel, ice and return home.
“We are establishing important infrastructure facilities for our fishermen and this is one that we are going to witness today is an important facility.
“We are also embarking on Lae Wagang dedicated fish facilities that would also be catering for the industrial fisheries.
“They have problems of offloading of catches into the tuna plant. We are looking at building a big wharf facility in Lae to cater for this.
“We are looking at our smaller people where we have 70 per cent of our fishermen in PNG and we’d like to establish important facilities like that to assist them.”