Fiji’s fisheries sector is having a difficult run. Catches are declining. Processors are short on raw material. Low-quality cheap imports are eating into local markets. Climate change is reshaping the conditions vessels operate in. Operating costs keep climbing. And then COVID-19 arrived to make every one of those problems harder.
The instinct in moments like this is to wait it out. The better instinct is to ask which parts of how we work weren’t really working before, and which of those we can fix now while we have everyone’s attention. For Fijian fisheries, digital transformation is near the top of that list — and unlike some of the structural challenges facing the industry, it’s something we can actually act on this year.
The Numbers Make the Case
Take one specific example: the manual processes that sit between the Ministry of Fisheries and the fishing companies it regulates. Forms, signatures, in-person submissions, paper that has to be physically moved from one office to another. Digitising those processes is straightforward, and our experience suggests savings of at least 40% in both time and cost — for both sides of the relationship.
That isn’t a marginal improvement. Forty percent of staff time previously spent shuffling paper is forty percent more capacity for the work that actually moves the industry forward. And the resilience benefit is just as real: when COVID-19 disrupted normal office operations, the processes that depended entirely on paper were the ones that broke first.
Permits Are the Obvious Place to Start
If you ask people in the Fijian fishing industry where the friction lives, permit applications come up almost every time. It’s the single most common issue we hear about. The current process is manual, slow, and frustrating for everyone involved — fishing companies waste time and money chasing applications through the system, and the Ministry burns staff hours on tasks that could run themselves.
A digital permitting solution is something we can stand up in weeks at modest cost, and the savings to the industry would run into tens of thousands of dollars annually. There is no good technical reason this hasn’t already happened. There are some change-management reasons, and those are solvable.
What We’ve Already Built
Traseable Solutions has been doing this work in the fisheries sector for some time. We’ve digitised processing operations from vessel through factory, with carton labels, packing lists, and invoices generated automatically from the underlying data rather than typed up by hand at each stage. The next step is a mobile app that gives fishing companies more flexibility on the floor and more usable insights from the data they’re already capturing.
None of this is exotic technology. It’s the kind of practical, well-understood tooling that other industries have used for years. Fisheries has been slower to adopt it, partly because of the operating environment and partly because the right partners haven’t always been available. Both of those are changing.
A Genuine Win-Win
Digital transformation in fisheries isn’t a story about replacing people with software. It’s a story about freeing skilled staff from low-value administrative work so they can focus on the things humans actually do well — relationships, judgement, problem solving. It’s about making the regulator’s job easier at the same time as the regulated industry’s. And it’s about building the kind of operational resilience that means the next disruption — whatever shape it takes — doesn’t bring the sector to a halt.
The win-win is real. The tools exist. The case is clear. What’s left is the decision to get started.