Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

public figures who had seen RD Tuna in Madang, and become aware of its labour, sanitationand pollution issues, not to mention its court cases with the landowners, were confident thatlight industry could be done differently, and that the Sepik people could have it their way, fortheir benefit. Indeed, SST did learn from RD’s mistakes, most notably in its engineering anddesign, both of which are proudly touted to be state of the art. Even its odour filtration system(because, after all, every fish factory has an odour) is amongst the best in the world. Some ofRD’s own management team, and some floor workers as well, also came over from Madang tojoin the new team. In these ways, SST has been ahead of the curve in PNG, at least for thefishing industry: having seen the processing precedents, they were bound to make a better go ofit.Some of the management team originally hired out of Port Moresby were alumni of other largeresource development projects in PNG, like Ok Tedi, and others had certainly experiencedsmaller projects (from running water to piggeries) being introduced to peri-urban and ruralsettings. Undoubtedly a lot of PNG-specific management information is under contract to SST,even if it’s not been utilized. Perhaps the plans were drawn against fishing industry standardsonly, perhaps they were concretized before Papua New Guineans could have a say. In eithercase, the management style and ethos of SST is entirely esoteric to the PNG context and has yetto engage some of the critical issues that most developers grapple with in this country, namelylandowner rights, the ‘living’ wage, community relations, and financial transparency.Nancy Sullivan Ltd., was engaged by HELP Resources, Wewak, to undertake a social impactstudy of the factory, as part of a training program in ethnographic research tools for the NGO’scommunity volunteers. We arrived late June (2005) and spent ten days in workshop sessionswith roughly 40 volunteer-participants. We then sent them out on two large studies, one ofvanilla, the other of SST. Ultimately about 8 dedicated volunteers joined a team of 6 NancySullivan Ltd. employees (including the company Director) in a town-based study of the loiningplant and its workers, its business profile, its history and general social impact on Wewak town.Our company previously authored a social impact report on RD Tuna in Madang, called TinpisMaror (for which Thomas Warr was a Principal Investigator). In total, we spent a monthgathering information and interviews from representatives groups and individuals. Some ofthese interviews are excerpted here, some provide redundant verification of facts and opinions,and many more not represented here have formed the basis of our understanding of SST. Anytypos or inaccuracies are our own.The task before us began as a social impact report on the South Seas Tuna loining factory inWewak. In the end, however, it grew to become an economic analysis of Wewak’s businessclimate at present. We found that it was impossible to isolate the factory from the businesscommunity at large in order to conduct a true social impact study. On the one hand, we might beable to talk about the factory as a discrete business entity, whose owners and operators wereostensibly disassociated from other commercial proposals and projects surrounding it. But onthe other hand, this would inadequately represent how very opaque and layered the climate ofcommerce is at present in Wewak, and so for this reason we have opened Pandora’s box slightlyto reveal how typical, how of a piece and compatible are the conditions and structures of SouthSeas Tuna in the present business environment in Wewak and the East Sepik Province moregenerally.South Seas Tuna is one of very few fish production plants in PNG today, and these are amongstthe first light industry factories to be introduced to the commercial sector as part of adownstream processing emphasis on the part of The National government. In Wewak’s case, thetuna now being loined at SST would otherwise have been shipped to similar plants in the20