KEY POINTS:
Pacific Islands fishing has been boosted by a European Union decision to change the rules of origin regime for fish exports from the region.
The agreement, at this month's Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga, is especially important for the region's tuna canning business.
The Pacific Islands fisheries industry
has depended largely on revenue from fishing licences it issues to countries outside the region to farm the islands' exclusive economic zones.
The catch is processed outside the region and exported to global markets.
Scarce investment in infrastructure for downstream facilities such as processing and canning has led to billions of dollars of missed opportunities for value addition to marine farmed product.
New trade rules have further sought to put the region at a disadvantage and the islands' small fishing and canning industry has languished over the past few years.
The Solomon Islands straddles one of the world's most tuna-rich oceans, but earns only a pittance in licence fees, with all profits from further processing taken outside the region.
It has its own small canning industry, but it urgently needs an upgrade.
"We want to move quickly into downstream processing, more onshore facilities to cater for the high-end market. We want to restructure our canneries. Value-addition is the only way forward," Solomons Finance Minister Gordon Darcy Lilo said in May.
The agreement at the forum would justify such a move. It is part of an interim trade deal that has been cobbled together after discussions between Pacific Islands, Caribbean and African nations and the EU mainly to meet the December 31 deadline to bring their commercial ties in line with World Trade Organisation rules.
The WTO-compatibility factor built into the interim deal is expected to form the basis of a new, longer term Economic Participation Agreement (EPA) that will be signed next year.
The prospect of this new EPA spells a good opportunity for revitalising the region's fish processing industry.
The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat's economic governance director, Dr Robert Grynberg, said: "The EU has never done this with any other region in the world. The development is good, especially for the Melanesian states, which already have canneries."
This opens big investment and joint venture opportunities with Islands governments, particularly for the smaller nations of Tuvalu and Kiribati, whose economic zone sprawls across the equatorial Pacific.
Relatively low costs of setting up industries, cheap and plentiful labour and the 10-year window the new regime will operate in are factors in favour of any new investment in the sector in the islands region.
The 10-year window is important, because within a decade, the EU is set to lower its external tariffs from 24 to about 8 or 9 per cent. That will level the field for Pacific processed fish exporters and those outside, narrowing the difference in the margins.
* Dev Nadkarni, based in Auckland, is editor of news website islandsbusiness.com
