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Fiji’s fishing industry is doing well and has the potential to do even better, Reserve Bank of Fiji governor Savenaca Narube said.
He said it is one of the resources that the country has plenty of, adding that Fiji needed to harness that through marketing, and so forth to make that happen.
Last year, Fiji’s total fish export receipts amounted to around $101.3 million compared to $97.9m in 2006 representing a 3.5 per cent increase over the corresponding period last year.
However, a Fiji based exporter of wholesale seafood Fiji Fish Marketing Group early this month declared that it would be cutting almost 300 jobs because of unfair operating conditions for local fishing vessels. The company has already laid off at least 60 workers early this year.
Narube says the RBF does not know the details of that yet. “That will have an impact on that figure. So we will have to wait and see.”
In a statement early January, the FFMG complained that foreign vessels were allowed to operate at 30 per cent lower operational costs than Fiji-flagged vessels, paying no licence fee to Fiji, no duty on fuel or inputs, no RBF compliance and yet employ foreign crews.
In contrast, local companies were forced to pay all these costs.
The FFMG complained the foreign vessels were subsidized not only by their governments but by the Fiji government as well.
“In spite of various submissions over the years to various government in relation to this matter, the response has been to further increase the charges to the locals and continue to subsidise to the foreign operators.”
It said that the local fishing industry could follow in the footsteps of the once great copra and banana industries if the administration did not take the matter seriously.
The FFMG and the Ministry of Fisheries are expected to meet this week to discuss preferential treatment for foreign vesssels.
