Hopes For New Tahiti

Pearl Industry

Pearl shell, at the beginning of this century a significant French Polynesian export, may make a comeback in the territory.

Though there is not nearly as much shell about today as there was in the 1900’s, the Government of French Polynesia is encouraging experiments into cultured pearl and is showing increasing concern about the overfishing of the valuable Tuamotu and Gambier shell grounds.

Polynesian pearl shell is fetching $l,OOO a ton on Japanese and German markets and divers, who number up to 500 or 600, are earning up to $lOO a week —more than twice the money earned by hotel staff.

Divers work six hours a day, making about 100 dives—some of them to depths of 150 ft.

In June Papeete buyers said that overseas demand for Polynesian pearl exceeded supplies by five times!

In August a quota of 60 tons of pearl shell from the southerly Gambier atolls is due to arrive in Papeete. At about the same time shelling on two Tuamotu atolls will finish and in September shelling will commence on Raroia and another atoll in the Tuamotus.

Marutea, a Gambier atoll, has seen shelling operations since last Decem ber and about 120 tons of shell are collected there.

Papeete’s two biggest buyers of shell, the French Herve Company and a Chinese group, pay three per cent, export tax on the shells.

Currently grounds are rested for four years but biologists feel if the grounds are not rested for 50 years pearl shell will disappear from the territory’s small export list in the 1970’5.

Cultured pearls

Meanwhile, government and com mercial experiments are underway on cultured pearl and hopes are that just as “pearl farms” have almost re placed natural pearls on Australia’s Torres Strait islands and in the Papuan Gulf, a similar development could come about in the Tuamotus and Gambiers.

French Polynesia’s Fisheries De partment has begun rudimentary tests on several Tuamotu atolls. Results so far have been inconclusive.

On Manihi, a northerly Tuamotu atoll, the Manihi Experimental Pearl

Culture Company, financed by Rosenthal Brothers, Paris pearl merchants, with a small Papeete shareholding, has been operating for about 18 months without a major breakthrough.

Government tests will incorporate

lessons learnt from cultured shell in dustries in the Red Sea.

In the meantime, French Polynesia is expected to export between 20 and 40 tons of trochus shell by 1970 to Japan and Europe.

Imported from New Caledonia 12 years ago, it is now growing, slowly but surely, on Tahiti, other Society Islands and parts of the Tuamotus.

Greensnail shell, introduced from the New Hebrides, hasn’t been such a happy migrant. Much of it has died or disappeared from where it was planted around sheltered parts of Tahiti. There are no plans to import more.