55 million Vatu remitted to Port Vila

Dev Nadkarni
As the small delegation of New Zealand farmers exited Port Vila’s Bauerfield International Airport in Vanuatu, one of the members was literally mobbed, hugged and heaped with leis by a group of ni-Vanuatu men and women waiting at the airport to receive him.

The member was Lee Arlidge, operations manager of Crasborn Developments, a firm involved in the production and post-harvest of a range of fruit including apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, plums and kiwifruit on its 300-hectare farm in the Hawke’s Bay region.

Crasborn has been employing Pacific islands workers for fruit picking as part of the New Zealand government’s Registered Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme that has been in operation for just over a year. Many of Crasborn’s workers were from Vanuatu who had successfully worked one season and returned to their homeland.

It was some of these workers who were at the airport to meet Arlidge to show their gratitude and also let him know of their availability for the next fruit-picking season.

Close to 2000 farm workers from Vanuatu took part in the RSE scheme and representatives of both the governments of Vanuatu and New Zealand expressed satisfaction at the way the scheme had progressed.

“As soon as the scheme was announced, there was very high interest,” Lionel Kaluat, Labour Commissioner and acting chief executive of the Vanuatu Investment Promotion Authority said.

For Vanuatu, the RSE scheme was the first time that such a sizeable number of workers left the country to earn their living outside.

Unlike other Pacific islands countries like Samoa, Tonga and Fiji, Vanuatu has almost no citizens living and working abroad except for a few in neighbouring New Caledonia that are sending back remittances in small amounts.

“People in Vanuatu have never been exposed to living abroad and sending a part of their income back home. So this is the first time tthe country has seen a remittances come in,” said Kaluat.

As much as 55 million vatu came in as remittances from New Zealand in the first year of the RSE scheme. “This has been a major foreign exchange revenue earner for the economy,” he said.

Most of the recruitment was from Port Vila in the first instance. As well as prospective workers approaching the Vanuatu government’s Department of Labour directly, agents registered with the department recruit most of the workers for the RSE scheme. This is especially true of the outer islands.

But the documentation required for the workers to make the trip to New Zealand such as medical and X-ray reports appeared to be a problem especially in the outer islands because of a lack of infrastructure as well as proper information and the paucity of officials and channels to take the applicants through the various stages and process their documents through to the immigration department.

This was a concern for the outlying islands, said Joel Path, secretary-general of Sanma Province on Vanuatu’s largest island of Santo—fast turning into a major tourist destination to rival Port Vila, especially after flights from Australia began landing in its provincial capital Luganville in recent years.

There was a lot interest in the province for the RSE scheme and though there were a few workers from there in the initial year, Santo residents were hopeful of being recruited in larger numbers in the next round, he said.

Meanwhile, the Vanuatu government is planning to step up its publicity initiatives in the outer islands and also increase the number of processing centres to ensure there would be more workers from the outer islands in subsequent years, Kaluat said.

The governments of New Zealand and Vanuatu have worked closely on the RSE scheme. Before embarking on their sojourn workers are trained on the different aspects of living and working in New Zealand. But the short orientation programme has not prevented a few problems that are bound to crop up when people from a particular background and culture are transplanted into a completely alien country.

Some of the farmers ISLANDS BUSINESS spoke to said that there had been teething problems but they were quickly sorted out. A few of these had to do with acclimatisation (coming from a tropical island to New Zealand’s cold climate could never be without its challenges despite layers upon layers of warm clothes), as well as the use of tools, procedures and the different work ethic.

There were also a couple of incidents where workers got emotionally involved with some locals that could potentially cause problems in the wider community around the farms but these were quickly resolved by counselling.

Most workers, however, quickly adapted to both the working and climatic conditions in New Zealand quite satisfactorily, said the farmers. Their productivity improved as the weeks rolled by and all the farmers in the delegation expressed interest in recruiting larger numbers of workers in subsequent years.

The workers ISLANDS BUSINESS spoke to in Vanuatu also wanted to return and said that now they had some experience, their productivity would improve. The extra income earned in New Zealand went a long way in improving conditions in their villages and communities, they said.

The farmer-employers are also looking at refining the process of recruitment and driving costs down by liaising with the New Zealand and Vanuatu governments as well as the airlines.

One of the suggestions made during an interactive session with officials in Port Vila was the possibility of chartering Air Vanuatu flights from Port Vila or Santo (since Luganville airport is capable of handling jet aircraft such as the Boeing 737) directly to their destination regions around New Zealand instead of landing in Auckland and then transferring to regional flights. This would save costs considerably and the savings passed on to the workers themselves.

The success of the RSE scheme in New Zealand has spurred the Australian government to trial a similar scheme.

Dev Nadkarni was a member of the Air Vanuatu-Pacific Island Trade and Investment Commission’s RSE mission in which Kiwi seasonal employers visited Vanuatu to look at employing Vanuatu workers and to consider investing in the agriculture and forestry sectors.