By Tupuola Terry Tavita
Editor

Let’s cut to the chase.

We need a fish cannery like Starkist or similar mid-range to large-scale production factories that can employ up to 500-1000 people.

Yazaki Samoa has been a boon to the local economy, but as the population grows, we need more such ventures.

And we don’t really need to look overseas.

Going through the supermarket shelves, you look at products like canned pineapple, soya bean sauce, mango jam, orange and passion fruit juice, etc. You then ask yourself, these brand companies employ thousands of workers to produce these products. Why can’t we do it here?

After all, the basic ingredients grow wild in Samoa.

There are mangoes everywhere, oranges are a-dripping-and-a-dropping in the west coast of Savai’i, soya bean is also ideal for the elevated humidity there, passion fruit we experimented 20 years ago thrive in our climate, pineapples grow better in Samoa than Hawaii – the biggest pineapple producing region in the world. There are practically a host of other process-able fruits around.

The Samoa Research Center at Nafanua is doing a wonderful job with coconut, avocado and breadfruit-based commercial research. Women in Business is also doing an equally excellent job. But we need to push the envelope.

We would like to see them move onto other fruits that are widely available in Samoa. Nonu, ambarella (vi) and mandarin orange (moli saina) are a just a few.

Grated ambarella juice sold on the roadside is deliciously sweet. There surely must be a market for it somewhere. And if there is demand for it, we are certain our farmers will be eager to supply. It will certainly diversify our farming systems. We lack big tree harvests in Samoa. And ambarella grows wild here.

Despite trucking loads to Apia to sell, mandarin oranges still practically rot everywhere in Savaii when in season. The fruit is 100 percent organic and surely there must be a demand for a range of based-products of such a healthy non-engineered produce.

And why do we have to wait for some Chinese company to research our nonu?

We now have the facilities at Nafanua to do that. The management and the vision also. The next logical step is to invest in our young scientists to go into specialized areas like pomology – the study of fruits.

At thi stage of our development, we certainly need our fruit scientists.

Sweet.

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Palemia Ugapo