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

N: “Have you sponsored sporting groups?”IB: “ No, but I mean we get involved in the community as much as we can. Our cafeteria buyssupplies locally…so it’s…some of the local businesses in PNG we buy a lot of parts from.”N: “Are there management programs for training?”IB: “ We don’t have any formalized training programs, but this company is operating, its gotmyself and sixteen other expats only, we don’t have a large, and we obviously, all our positions,we are training when people are available, these people are training to take their positions. Ifyou look around the factory you’ll observe that all the fish cleaning is predominantly by womenemployees and that entire area works under the guidance of one expat on each shift and all thesupervisors, team leaders, are local people from Wewak…one or two people had alittleexperience at RD, but all the team leaders supervising out there are all local.”N: “What about landowner issues? This was State land?”IB: “Yeah, I mean, you never get away from the landowner issues, but we have a lease from theDepartment of Lands and we have not had any direct demands made of us…This was actuallyleased by the Harvbours Board, which bought from the State, and of course the traditionallandowners always exist, as I understand it, but this piece was bought by the Harbours Board.“This fish was being processed in Thailand before, it was being caught here…our fishermenoperate with local licenses and with foreign licenses, and the idea that theyre taking all the fishout of here, well they’re not fishing out here, this fish is not additional production, in fact a lotof the fish we’re supplying was being processed in Marjoro, in the Marshall islands, and thatfactory has been closed down, so really the business has shifted here.N: “What if new factories open?”IB: “We’ll, maybe they have to think about whether they’ll be able to survive, but we’re alreadyhere. This is not additional production. I don’t get involved in that end of the business. Now ifthey want to put a factory here, obviously they’ve got to look at the economics of it…Oh theboats here were here before, we were fishing for years before we opened.”N: “Do you buy from local fishermen?”IB: “Locals suppliers we haven’t had as yet, we would take fish from local suppliers if they canbring in good quality fish, skip jack or yellowfin…There are no fishing groupsI think there’s alot of organizing that needs to be done as yet, but we would definitely support them.”N: “Does anything on the fish say PNG?”IB: “Well, they call it exporting, but really the fish is of PNG origin, but the product is stampedfrom another country, we don’t labelt he product at all, we’re registered, this is regiustered inthe USA and we follow their guidelines.But if you picked up Starkest you wouldn’t know wherethe fish came from.“We purse seine the fish…there is a very small quantity of what they call miscellaneous orbycatch it might be about ahhh….and now the Provincial Fisheries are buying some of that, and89