Samoan Canners Hope For Market Upturn

“We’ll can anything that will can,” boasts Mike McCabe, general manager of Western Samoa’s only cannery, owned by Samoan Tropical Products Ltd and operating on the outskirts of the capital, Apia.

A small factory, which employs 40 people during the five-month season and a smaller staff during the rest of the year, it turns out a dozen varieties of canned fruits, juices and vegetables—the juice of the pineapple, guava, papaw and passionfruit, pineapple chunks and crushed pineapple, taro chips and pulasami, that de licious concoction of taro leaves and coconut cream.

Mike McCabe probably scored a first when he canned, of all things, palolo—balolo in Fijian—that un usual sea worm, which lives on the ocean bed all the year round until, around November, it rises in its millions to the surface to propagate—and provide a soup which is a gourmet’s delight.

The canning, a special job, mainly for Samoans living in the United States was a big success, but it’s

only a once-yearly operation and palolo are not plentiful in Samoan waters.

Mike McCabe and his directors are a worried bunch these days. They once had a lucrative market in New Zealand. Sometimes a delivery would amount to 5,000 cartons with 24 cans to the carton. That was until re cently when the NZ Government allowed in similar products from Malaysia and Taiwan on the same tariff basis.

As Malaysian and Taiwan can land their cans at a lower price, they are pushing the Samoans out of the market, although Mike believes his products are of better quality.

So here’s a job for the Forum’s Bureau for Economic Co-operation, to the ideals of which the NZ Government subscribes. The cannery is building up a useful market in American Samoa, and hopes to increase sales in the South Pacific Forum countries, but it really needs its NZ market to ensure its future.