MAJURO — Two pearl oyster companies in the Marshall Islands are attempting to move from pilot project status to a full-scale commercial industry to gain a share of the market that produces multi-million dollar revenues and employs hundreds in French Polynesia and the Cook Islands.
The Marshall Islands pearl farms are fledgling-–their harvest values are in the tens of thousands of dollars, not millions–-but local managers say recent harvests are demonstrating the future promise of this growing industry in this central Pacific nation.
Black Pearls of Micronesia produced its latest harvest last week from a small pearl oyster farm it has operated in Majuro since the mid-1990s. The harvest, though smaller than expected, is nevertheless a major rebound from a severe virus that damaged or killed close to 60 percent of the oysters under cultivation in 1998, according to Robert Muller, one of the local owners.
The company had hoped to generate pearls from about 8,000 oysters in the harvest, but ended up with a bit less than half the expected amount, he said. “Remnants of the virus were still evident in some of the animals (oysters) that were brought” from another island, he said. The good news for the farm is that none of the newer oysters have become infected, suggesting that the virus is a problem of the past.
Muller and farm manager Virgil Alfred are enthusiastic, despite the smaller-than-expected harvest, because they say the quality and color of many of the pearls grown at their Majuro farm is high. The harvest has provided a hint of what larger harvests could begin producing, Muller said.
A slightly older pearl farm, operated by large local business Robert Reimers Enterprises, harvested its largest batch of pearls late last year, valued at about $50,000. This pearl farm has developed to the point that it has the quantity of oysters adequate to begin twice-yearly harvests-–one of the first steps to making the operation commercially viable.
Recently, BPOM has also expanded to Arno, a neighboring atoll to Majuro, where it is operating a second pearl oyster farm. At each farm, BPOM has about 15,000 oysters. But they’re aiming to triple or quadruple the numbers over the next two of years to get past the “pilot project” stage to a commercial level of production, Muller said. Key to making the pearl farm commercially viable is the operation of a pearl oyster hatchery to produce the baby oysters—spat—to sustain the farms in the Marshall Islands.
The two companies are discussing ways to work together to jointly operate a pearl oyster hatchery to supply the needs of both farm operations for baby oysters. Robert Reimers Enterprises chief financial officer Peter Fuchs said that there is significant interest from a number of outside foundations and organizations to fund pearl training and development programs in the Marshall Islands. Currently, two US federally funded programs—through the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Department of Labor—are supporting pearl seeding and training programs at the BPOM farm.
Compared to the Cook Islands and French Polynesia, where large pearl oyster industries are supported totally from naturally-occurring baby oysters—or “spat”—the Marshall Islands atoll environment differs significantly. Experiments to capture spat in the wild in the Marshall Islands have failed and a hatchery is required to produce the baby oysters needed for the industry, said both Muller and Fuchs.
