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The fish ponds are small concrete freshwater ponds dug into the ground and stocked with fingerlings (baby fish) provided by PNG’s National Fisheries Authority.

Fish ponds and meal in Tari

Oxfam and partner Hela Community Care are improving livelihoods in Tari, Papua New Guinea though projects which are providing people with food security, health benefits and an income.

Fish ponds

People in Tari don’t have a long history of fish eating, and although they live on basic staples, they have always had adventurous diets. They started to develop an interest in fish with the influx of tinned varieties decades ago, and there has been a gradually increasing demand for more of the fresh variety.

HCC is setting up fish breeding centres in remote communities, with five fully operational. They are also running a training scheme to ensure that people can maintain the fish, feed them and ultimately manage a readily available source of cheap, sustainable and nutritional food for their families.

The fish supplement people's rudimentary diets for half of the year, but they are also a means for people to generate their own income: the remainder of the year the fish are sold on to other local people or exchanged for foodstuffs.

Operation

The fish ponds are small concrete freshwater ponds dug into the ground and stocked with fingerlings (baby fish) provided by PNG’s National Fisheries Authority. Oxfam is funding staff salaries and travel costs for people travelling to the workshops, whilst OilSearch, the local community affairs department of LNG, a gas company, has funded the ponds’ construction.

Difficult socio-political issues prevent the fish ponds from being run as co-operatives, but the fish ponds tend to be family-run businesses and farmers are keen to adopt the cooperative model as soon as it is possible.

Feeds

At Koli farm, a scheme run by HCC in Tari, people keep livestock including rabbit, fish and hens. These need a balanced diet in order to produce meat and eggs. Hela Community Care (HCC) is working with the National Agricultural Research Institute to helping people produce their own sustainable animal feed so that local people can move away from a dependency on expensive imported feeds.

Combining the ingredients into a ball, which will then be pushed through a grinder to produce pellets that are used to feed the fish kept in ponds.

Fishmeal training

Fish meal training sessions have been set up to encourage local fish keepers to use local ingredients to feed their fish, which are reared for food and selling in specially constructed ponds.

At one session organised by HCC, 43 people turned up to take part, including two women who had walked for two days to get to the training. The day is overseen by a Fisheries Officer, who teaches participants about which ingredients to use in their feed, commonly rice bran, cassava, kumara and flour.

The ingredients are ground up and mixed together to create a paste, which is rolled into a small ball. This is then pushed through grinders, which are supplied by local company Oilsearch. The resultant pellets are then dried and ready to be used to feed fish.

Making their own pellets means the women can save money on buying expensive, imported feeds. The money they save can be used to reinvest in their fish ponds, or saved up to buy their children clothes, food and medicines. Some women couldn’t believe they could make the feed themselves.

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