[?]uggested Cannery
p. 35 · Read in the full issue
Pineapple
[?]Nture
[?]uggested Cannery For Lae
GROUP of residents of Lae, New Guinea, have formed a committee to promote the idea establishing a local pineapple aery. tie company is to have a nominal tal of £lOO,OOO, which is to be ed in the Territory and in Aus ia. The committee believes that entire output of canned pines Id find a ready market. CSIRO »rts indicate that New Guinea oth-skinned pines are suitable canning for the market that the rioters have in mind. It is be ;d that New Guinea could grow cient of the fruit to produce )0 tons of canned pineapple annum.
Editorial Note
large book could be written it the pineapple canning busi , as it applies to Pacific Islands, t ventures that have started riciously have ended in failure, details of the new industry in are available in Sydney and it be that the promoters have in
mind a market that will counteract the initial difficulties that they are sure to encounter.
Only one Island has made a suc cess of pineapple canning and that is Hawaii, which has a virtual monopoly of the tremendous Ameri can market. Fiji has had pineapple canneries for the past quarter century but with the end of the 1955-56 packing season, the last cannery—that owned and operated by the big Colonial Sugar Refining
Company—closed down.
When announcing this in March, 1955, the Company simply said that operations were “uneconomic.” The CSR cannery had been operating then for about 20 years.
At the time of the announcement the feeling in Fiji was that “If the CSR cannot make a go of it, no one can.” The Company had its own land, grew its own pines, had the necessary engineers and workshops at its sugar mills in Fiji; it had chemists, soil scientists and experi enced agriculturists. Furthermore, it had the raw sugar.
However, lack of suitable land was the vital factor in the CSR decision, as a large slice of the former pine apple growing lands was resumed for Fiji’s international airport at Nadi. The CSR had been under taking experiments in pineapple growing on the other large island
of Fiji, Vanua Levu, but the land was proved not suitable.
This is where NG will have an advantage over Fiji—the promoters calculate that NG can grow sufficient pineapples to provide 10,000 tons of canned fruit per annum, and that is a lot of pineapples in any language.