Onshore investment focus of Fisheries

NFA Deputy Managing Director Philip Polon.

By MATTHEW VARI

Sunday, September 11, 2016 (Sunday Chronicle, PNG)

WITH Papua New Guinea contributing to 17% of global tuna fisheries to date- National Fisheries Authority (NFA) maintains its focus now centers in encouraging onshore investment to provide jobs and food security in the highly lucrative and capital intensive sector.

Deputy Managing Director for NFA Philip Polon reiterated the need to explore market opportunities when speaking at the 40th Anniversary of Diplomatic Relations with Korea through a PNG-Korea Dialogue Forum hosted at the National Research Institute.

“I hope with Korea here we will also start something on that to explore any marketing opportunities for PNG to market its products as well,” Mr Polon said.

“In terms of development for PNG, the biggest part for NFA is concerned about is the employment all women and girls in those factories who take up roughly 60% of the workforce in those factories.”

“We are excited that development of canning in PNG basically attributes to that sector to address employment. The most important part of this is that at least there is food on the table.”

He said with offshore tuna fishing for PNG centered on catching only- onshore development has been picking up with foreign direct investment taking place in the country.

“All the processing facilities in PNG are foreign owned, including Madang with Philipines, Wewak the Taiwanese, Lae the Philipines. So PNG we have the strengthen ourselves to put finance together to own some facilities.”

“I appeal to everyone- the fishing part of it as well is foreign based. So if were serious about it as well developing our opportunities in fishing, we might as well invest in it- it is very serious in PNG must invest in fishing sector.”

Polon added that given the lack of finance- many of the fishing companies have been invited through bilateral arrangements to come and invest in PNG with long term aim for localization of the industry yet to be realized due to the huge capital needed to enter commercialized fishing.

“The idea is over time when we have deeper pockets we should be able to start buying bits until we own some of these- but the market is open and if we could get some of those LNG resources transformed into PNG equity that would be good.”

“One of the biggest challenges we have is monitoring and control. To control the EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) we need planes, mini patrol boats- we have the resource in terms of cash but we are unable to cover the entire area of PNG and so we will have illegal at the border between Indonesia and PNG or elsewhere.”