BY GIFF JOHNSON
Marshall Islands Correspondent
MAJURO, Marshall Islands — After eight deliveries of skipjack tuna to Walmart in 2022, the first year of a new supply deal with the Majuro-based Pacific Island Tuna Provisions company, Walmart is looking to accelerate the volumes of fish being delivered for processing under the U.S. retail giant’s house tuna brand, Great Value.
In January, Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority Director Glen Joseph, and representatives of Pacific Islands Tuna and its joint venture partner The Nature Conservancy, met with top Walmart executives at their Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters. The meeting reviewed the first year of the tuna supply deal and plans for the future. It was quickly followed by Walmart dispatching Sean Reber, the company’s senior director for Sourcing and Procurement, to Majuro in mid-February to meet Parties to the Nauru Agreement officials, who were holding their first meeting in Majuro since the border opened last year.
“Walmart is actively supporting this project,” Reber said.
He said Walmart identified 20 commodities that the company wants to ensure are being sourced sustainably. Tuna is one of these products. “The change is good for the company, good for our customers and good for the planet,” Reber said.
What this translates to is that Walmart, which was ranked as the number one company in 2022 in the Fortune 100 list of U.S. businesses — above Amazon, Apple and Exxon Mobil — is putting its buying weight behind tuna that is caught using the PNA system for sustainably managing tuna.
The membership of the Marshall Islands in the PNA has allowed it to capitalize on an entirely new piece of the value chain by engaging with Walmart to be a supplier of tuna — a first for the Marshall Islands and a first for PNA nations.
In a Feb. 27 interview, Joseph said the eight multi-container shipments of raw tuna product for a Walmart cannery in the Philippines was turned into 11 million cans of Walmart’s house brand canned tuna.
The link with Walmart took five years to develop as part of the Marshall Islands-The Nature Conservancy joint venture to find a way for the Marshall Islands to add value to its tuna fishery in a sustainable manner.
The PNA’s vessel day scheme, a world class management system, controls purse seine fishing for skipjack, keeping it within sustainable catch levels by capping the number of days PNA members can sell each year.
The MIMRA-TNC partnership led to establishment of Pacific Island Tuna Provisions, a Marshall Islands registered corporation set up as a tuna supply company. Using the PNA system as a foundation, “we have already ticked all the boxes for standards and requirements” Walmart is looking for, Joseph said. “We are not only meeting the standards; we are now putting a face and story behind the tuna.”
The fact is, other PNA countries are showing interest in the PITP-Walmart arrangement. At the mid-February PNA meeting, Kiribati Fisheries Minister Ribanataake Tiwau told the group that as part of the island region’s negotiations with the U.S. on the U.S.-Pacific tuna treaty, PNA can offer to give preference for its tuna to the U.S. market to bring more benefits to the region. He said he would like to see the current PITP plan “scaled up to the PNA level” and he thanked the Marshall Islands for sharing the initiative. Joseph said the PNA leaders from the nine participating islands asked the Marshall Islands to provide a list of options for expanding the supply of tuna being sold to Walmart and the U.S. market.
The Nature Conservancy’s Mark Zimring and KB Sakuma delivered a presentation to the PNA ministers and officials. Zimring said PITP was established to be scalable to the wider PNA.
Zimring described the PITP-Walmart tuna plan as an “exciting” development that has opened a window for Marshall Islands and PNA members to get into a completely new part of the tuna value chain.
So far, 15 purse seiners have signed up with PITP to supply tuna to Walmart, which Joseph calls a “potential game changer” in the tuna supply picture. The tuna that is caught without the use of fish aggregation devices is known as “free school” caught tuna and, together with 100% coverage of purse seiners by independent fisheries observers and PNA’s chain of custody rules, meets sustainable fishing rules established by the Marine Stewardship Council. “Walmart could absorb all the free school caught tuna PNA wide,” Joseph said of opportunities for expanding and bringing other PNA members into the supply system.
The way PITP is established, after covering its operations costs, the profit gets plowed back into the Marshall Islands — a payoff for sustainably managing its tuna.
“I have a deep sense of satisfaction that we’re being heard,” Joseph said. “The little things we do (in managing the tuna fishery) produces a result. It is paying off, opening doors.”
With Walmart an active partner purchasing tuna sourced from PNA waters, it affords the Marshall Islands and other PNA members a unique opportunity to expand their reach into this aspect of the tuna value chain, ending their role of being limited to only selling licenses to distant water fishing nations. mbj