Trade
New Zealand is Samoa's principal trading partner, typically providing between 35% and 40% of imports and purchasing 45%–50% of exports. Australia, American Samoa, the United States, and Fiji also are important trading partners. Its main imports are food and beverages, industrial supplies, and fuels. The primary sector (agriculture, forestry, and fishing) employs nearly two-thirds of the labor force and produces 17% of GDP. Samoa's principal exports are coconut products and fish.
Fishing has had some success in Samoan waters, but the biggest fisheries industry (headed by Van Camp and StarKist) has been based in American Samoa. StarKist Management announced that it was going ahead with setting up at Asau a blast-freezer project to be operational by 2002. This announcement dispelled a growing suspicion about the genuine motives of StarKist to move to Samoa. The proposed blast-freezer operations in Asau were expected to bring this village back to life.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Samoa
Famous quotes containing the word trade:
“International relations is security, it’s trade relations, it’s power games. It’s not good-and-bad. But what I saw in Yugoslavia was pure evil. Not ethnic hatred—that’s only like a label. I really had a feeling there that I am observing unleashed human evil ...”
—Natasha Dudinska (b. c. 1967)
“It passes, and we stay:
A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“People run away from the name subsidy. It is a subsidy. I am not afraid to call it so. It is paid for the purpose of giving a merchant marine to the whole country so that the trade of the whole country will be benefitted thereby, and the men running the ships will of course make a reasonable profit.... Unless we have a merchant marine, our navy if called upon for offensive or defensive work is going to be most defective.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)