Pasifika Resources

Pasifika Resources has a connected presence in Australia and Vanuatu with contacts throughout the Pacific.

In Australia, Pasifika Resources is a registered partnership of 8 years between Ms Anna Berry and Mr David O'Brien. In Vanuatu, Pasifika Resources operates as a Ni-Vanuatu registered business with several business licenses including export, wholesale, retail and kava supply.

Pasifika Resources’ history in Vanuatu goes back more than 10 years. With our first trip to Vanuatu together, we noticed that the outer island villages where being torn between the pressures of two worlds. One being their indigenous culture of tradition and subsistence existence. The other being a western influence with its requirements of paid education, western medicines and consumables – all which required a payment in dollars (vatu).

With 82 islands, over 80% of Ni-Van (people of Vanuatu) live in rural villages. The Government funded welfare net wouldn't catch a whale and people rely upon family in times of need. The vatu generated by the local island economies was minimal and it bled out quickly through the main arteries of imported white rice, petroleum and building materials.

Whilst the general well-being of the villagers was good and their lifestyle and spirit something to be truly envied, we saw the growing pressures of the “need for the vatu” being an increasingly destructive force on family and culture. This is our family and culture! We had to help and not let it slide like so many indigenous cultures.

So with our broader perspective, worldly knowledge and business acumen, we hatched a plan. The plan had the aim of generating outside vatu and having it flow into the island economies, not just “inside” vatu going round and round and bleeding out.

Our plan was based on export income and utilising the islands competitive advantages of a clean green environment and rural production savvy – the first commodities to be commercially grown would be the root crops of taro and cassava. This required Pasifika Resources to facilitate a production chain from the village garden, through a processing plant to a world market.

The village garden had been a subsistence system since existence. The idea of growing excess food in order to commercially supply an outside market took a major change of head space.

Pasifika Resources was responsible for setting up and promoting a systemised, continuous planting regime of root crops. This look many hours, days, weeks of going from village to village, island to island, opening peoples minds to this idea. Pasifika Resources also provided much support, technical experience and sweat to set up the first processing plant in Luganville on the island of Espirito Santo (Santo).

Then there was the matter of fulfilling export protocols, not to mention finding the export markets. This, with the help of others, Pasifika Resources achieved. We are proud to say that from our first export shipment in 2002 to this day the export income generated from the export of root crops still flows into the islands.

With the promotion of locally grown foods (island kia kia) that has occurred and Pasifika Resources has helped foster, the outer islands are supplying a growing domestic market into regional centres of Vanuatu. It was only through our knowledge of both worlds, our tribal standing and heart felt motivation and prayer we were able to achieve this. Whilst we do not now have a hands on role with the root crop export market we continue to support and play a role in domestic production and supply of foods.

You can email Pasifika Resources any time you like.