Coconuts provide wood, mats, thatch, medicine … and a future. 

 

Listener: 19 January, 2008. 

 

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; 

 

Last November, the Body Shop announced it was shipping 300kg of refined organic coconut oil from Samoa to Britain for use in a new product range to be launched in 2008. 

 

In some parts of the world – virtually all Pacific Islands and on continental tropical shores elsewhere – the coconut palm is so common it would be a weed, were it not so useful. Its fruit – the nut – is a source of food and drink; its coir (the fibre around the shell) is used in ropes, mats, brushes, caulking for boats and as compost; its trunk for wood; its leaves for baskets and roofing thatch; and its roots as a dye, a mouthwash and a medicine for dysentery. 

 

Perhaps its most important commercial resource is copra, the dried meat or kernel of the coconut. Traditionally coconut oil, which is 90 percent fat, is extracted from the copra by grating and grinding and then boiling in water. 

 

The oil can be used for cooking and manufacturing, and as a biodiesel alternative to oil, although not in New Zealand because it freezes at around 25EC. You are most likely to meet it as a skin moisturiser where it seems to have exceptional properties. 

 

Given the ease of growing the palms and processing the nuts, copra is a cheap commodity. Refined coconut oil, which requires higher production standards and superior skills, is expensive, perhaps by a factor of five (plus the cost of an attractive container). The smart producer does not stop at copra, but refines it to the purer product. 

 

I visited one of the sources of this oil last July, when I travelled to Samoa with our Pacific Mission led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters. 

 

New Zealand taxpayers do not directly support the small open-air factory that employs perhaps half a dozen men and women – our aid officials would find it very difficult to deal with such small businesses. Rather, NZAID supports the overarching organisation, Women In Business Development Incorporated (WIBDI), which fosters many such small enterprises and is delighted with its new export. 

 

It is WIBDI that ensures that production and quality standards are achieved. Already, it exports coconut oil and handicrafts to Australasia. Hopeful of annual exports of 10 to 30 tonnes a year to the Body Shop in Britain, it is taking on another big challenge. 

This represents a different aid strategy from New Zealand’s previous one. During our visit, we drove past timber plantations that were planted many years ago using New Zealand funds. But there had been so many conflicting objectives – between the foresters, the land owners and the workers – that the forests weren’t restored after the devastation of Hurricane Val in 1991. Instead, we switched to empowering the locals. 

 

Commercial businesses involve different ways of thinking about one’s life. 

 

We visited an ie-toga (fine mat) factory where women of the village were weaving. Each mat takes four and more months to make and sells for the princely sum (from a Samoan perspective) of $1000 and more. 

 

The financing for production and the selling in markets far from the factory is done by WIBDI. 

 

The mat-weavers also have household duties. But it dawned on their families that if they relieved them of some of the unpaid housework, the mat would be finished faster and the cash would arrive sooner. 

 

That is exactly the principle of comparative advantage that economists have trouble explaining in more developed economies. Specialisation leads to higher incomes for countries as well as families. 

 

And will it keep them, and later generations, in Samoa? 

 

The mats may seem expensive but the weavers are paid only about $55 a week – the average wage. Presumably families still depend on what they produce for themselves as opposed to the market, including from the ubiquitous coconut palm.