For a country with an unemployment rate pegged above 30 percent, the 150 employees put to work by the tuna loining plant is good news.
Despite close to $2 million in losses during 2008 and 2009 as the plant focused on training local employees and getting its equipment in operating order in its start up phase, Pan Pacific Foods is not giving up, said Majuro-based manager Don Xu. The plant has invested more than $10 million in facilities expansion, Xu said.
Marshall Islands’ fisheries chief Glen Joseph said the tuna plant is the type of development his government is pushing to gain a bigger share of the $3 billion annual fisheries pie in the Pacific. “We want investments and value added from our shores,” Joseph said as part of the islands’ aim to get more than the current five percent of the haul, amounting to just $150 million a year split among more than 15 countries.
In 2008, with limited production during the set up phase, the Majuro loining plant injected nearly $1 million into the local economy in salaries, taxes and local purchases, Xu said.
The plant buys tuna from purse seine fishing vessels, then cleans, fillets, cooks and flash freezes the fish, which are shipped out to canneries for final processing.
“Our aim is to produce 3,000 metric tons (of tuna loins) in 2009,” Xu said. That is only a warm up for the 10,000 tons Xu hopes the Majuro plant can produce in 2010.
Lending optimism for the future is the plant has recently bought a purse seine fishing boat and contracted with other fishing vessels to provide a consistent supply of fish in 2009 and 2010, Xu said.
“This will secure our supply of raw material,” he said, adding the goal is to increase to 400 workers by next year to meet production requirements.
Demand for jobs at the fish factory are high. In addition to 500 Marshall Islanders trained last year, another 300 have applied in the past week as news of the plant’s production start up spread, said Xu’s assistant, Romeo Reimers.
But the plant continues to face obstacles, both local and international.
Tuna prices in the U.S. market are currently low, which impacts PPF revenues. In addition, the plant often gets conflicting signals from government officials here when it needs help to get issues resolved.
Xu said during the past two years of seeking government support on myriad needs, he has not received a single written response from government officials that he has written letters to requesting their assistance. The government chose PPF, which is a subsidiary of a China-based corporation, to revive the tuna plant when an American firm that ran the plant from 1997 to 2004 went bankrupt. It has been given tax holidays and other incentives by the government.
The difficulty of obtaining written rules and regulations from government offices is one challenge for the plant as it works to comply with often changing regulatory requirements.
In spite of this, Xu remains optimistic. “We’ll try our best in 2009 to push production,” he said. “Pushing production” means salaries for workers, tax revenue for government and more income for local businesses.
