Majuro moves huge tuna volume

The hold of a Marshall Islands registered purse seiner disgorges tons of tuna for transshipment to off-shore canneries as well as to Pan Pacific Foods tuna loining plant. A PNA official says Majuro is now the world’s biggest tuna transshipment port. Photo: Hilary Hosia.
The hold of a Marshall Islands registered purse seiner disgorges tons of tuna for transshipment to off-shore canneries as well as to Pan Pacific Foods tuna loining plant. A PNA official says Majuro is now the world’s biggest tuna transshipment port. Photo: Hilary Hosia.

Majuro is the busiest tuna transshipment port in the world.  As much as 600,000 tons of tuna is now being off-loaded from purse seiners to carrier vessels a year, Parties to the Nauru Agreement Commercial Manager Maurice Brownjohn told a workshop in Majuro Monday.

About 1.7 million tons of skipjack is caught in PNA waters annually, accounting for 50 percent of the world’s supply of this type of tuna that is used mainly for canning.

Port Majuro has seen exponential growth of the transshipment industry. Marshall Islands Marine Resource Authority’s FY2015 preliminary report to Nitijela late last month said the number of transshipments increased by over 40 percent in 2015 compared to 2014, going from 495 to 704. This involved transshipping 444,393 tons of tuna in 2015.

According to Brownjohn, the tonnage volume is going up and now accounts for nearly one-third of all skipjack caught in PNA waters.

“Majuro is the biggest tuna transshipment port in the world,” he said.

Read more about this in the October 14, 2016 edition of the Marshall Islands Journal.