Fiji Shipping: Attention to Retention?

 


Can Fiji turn Attention to Retention?

Andrew Irvin, Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport, andrew.irvin@usp.ac.fj

As Fiji focuses on the future of its shipping sector, reflection on its past is a crucial undertaking. While in recent years, Fiji has revived its sailing heritage and enjoys an active sailing and paddling community alongside the continued presence of small-scale shipbuilding and larger dry-docking/repair operations, the capacity to independently meet the needs of domestic shipping operations has fallen by the wayside. Understanding what is required to accommodate the existing needs across the industry reveals that the public enterprise reform[1] undertaken thirty years ago offers only a partial blueprint for restoration of this capacity. It was not only a stripping of material assets that took place. Fiji has now endured three decades of human resource capacity loss as citizens seek education and employment opportunities abroad.

In 1994, a few years after the public enterprise reform began, the late Epeli Hau’ofa wrote Our Sea of Islands[2], which served as a critical examination of the capacity of Pacific Island cultures to craft their identities going forward, drawing on the knowledge and strength of the past. It is integral that Fiji and its island neighbours contend with the scope of systems built by those who do not live amidst the world’s largest ocean – those who continually marginalize the voices of island nations, dismissive of an intrinsic inability to muster “economies of scale.” 

So how does Fiji train and retain a new generation of seafarers? The recent labour debacle involving accusations of mistreatment of Filipino seafarers by Goundar Shipping[3] demonstrates the disparity in necessary skilled labour and the employment conditions under which they’re expected to operate. Fiji’s shipping industry needs to provide a compelling case for Fijians to participate.

This goes beyond competitive wages. If Fiji is to build the capacity of citizens to provide the naval architecture, marine engineering, construction, and seafaring skills needed to meet domestic shipping requirements, valorisation of these trades alone will not suffice. Regulation and policy must go well beyond what is needed to create a “level playing field”, since those citizens building these skills must be incentivized to return from obtaining their educations elsewhere and invest their efforts into domestic industry – this also includes investing in the training institutions needed to ensure future generations of shipping professionals need not leave the country to obtain educations in their trades. The next generation of Fijian shipping hinges on the actions taken by our generation to chart a safe course forward.

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