Exporting

coconut oil ... in a nutshell

“The reason the islanders are so beautiful is because when they are babies their mothers rub them with coconut oil.”

Kevin Ake was talking to PIM from his home in the Pennsylvania mountains, but his affection for the islands, for coconuts, and for coconut oil, was obvious.

Until a couple of years ago he had been the manager of Tobalar Copra Processing Plant Inc. on Majuro in the Marshalls.

Coconut has many uses in the Marshalls he explained.“ You can burn the shells for fuel, or make into charcoal, or use them to make drinking cups, earrings or necklaces; you can drink the milk, eat the meat, and cobk with the oil.” In addi tion, one can use the fibres of the husks in ropes and matting, the smoke from burning husks to repel insects, the leaves for a roof of a house, and the trunks for timber in the house. The principal cash product, however is oil made from the copra.

If gathering the whole nuts, and smashing them and drying them into copra are labour-intensive, their conversion into oil is a capital and equipment-inten sive process, according to the former plant manager.

Tobalar accepts only copra, not whole nuts. It then cuts the copra into small pieces, heats the pieces, heats the pieces and presses out the oil. Next the oil goes through a filtration process to remove remnants of shell and other impuri ties. Then it is stored in huge tanks until the next freighter arrives in the harbour.

“How do you get the oil from the company’s tanks to the ship?” he was asked.

“First we had to make sure that the ship’s tanks were perfectly clean, then we pumped the oil into the holds with fire hoses.”

Storing the oil in the Marshalls, and shipping in tropical areas is not a prob lem, but when the weather grows cold the oil congeals and becomes like lard which means that one cannot pump it from container to container. Ships head ing into colder climate need to be able to heat the oil in transit, to keep it a liq uid. Most oil from the Marshalls flows through two semi-tropical American ports, Los Angeles and New Orleans, which minimises the need for on-board heating.

Tobalar and other coconut oil processors need a lot of heat in the pressing process; starting up the boilers and the rest of the machinery is an expensive activity, so plant managers prefer to run the machinery 24 hours a day when they have sufficient raw product.

But the Tobalar plant is too big - or the Marshalls supply of copra is too small - for year-around, 24-hour operation, so much of the year the plant sits idle, wait ing for another burst of 24-hour work. The Marshalls regularly imports copra from other islands to keep the plant going.

During Ake’s tour of duty in the Marshalls he started a soap factory along side the copra pressing mill. The Marshalls had been in the position of shipping out coconut oil, and then importing soap from the US mainland, some of which con tained coconut oil.

Tobalar now produces several different brands of bar soap and hopes to export it as well as sell it in the Marshalls. “Unlike a lot of soap, our product worked well in salt water, which is important in a country where sometimes you need to wash yourself or your clothes in the sea,” he said.

There is still another by-product of coconut - copra meal - the residue left from copra after the oil has been pressed out. This has some nutritional value, and is often mixed with other materials and fed to cattle. Some ofTobalar’s copra meal is shipped to Fiji for that purpose. ■