Kamchatka

Kamchatka is at the eastern side of Russia with Japan, China, and Korea at its doorstep. At the top of Kamchatka near the isolated fishing town of Zarubino they have a scallop farm and they want to sell the product to the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans who have an insatiable desire for all types of sea foods. In Vladivostok people get married on Fridays. After the wedding they have a ceremony on a hill overlooking Vladivostok looked on by Chinese tourists. Vladivostok is a long way from Moscow.

The seaside town of Zarubino is the center of a new venture to grow scallops on long lines of rope in baskets. Scuba divers inspect them and test the new larvae to study the growing process. Kamchatka is at the end of the world - it is an isolated frontier. The Primorsky Kray Province is the center of Aquaculture on the Kamchatka Peninsular. It used to be off limits to foreigners during the old Soviet regime because of its strategic importance but now is open for tourism and development. Nowadays the province of Primorsky's main industries are shipping, fishing and fish processing, and timber.

There are millions of shell fish in the surrounding sea. The one year old scallops are sorted out and it is a new experience for most of the workers that have just started working in the fledgling aquaculture industry in the Kamchatka area. Originally the natural resource of shell fish were over-fished. Now they have to farm them. The Russian administration has not legalized the settlements used by the shell fish workers so no-one knows what the official position is about their living quarters. The sea gives the fishermen their livelihood but they have to spend five to six months at sea. Under the communists, people got jobs easily and were paid on time and they did not have to work that hard. But now they have to work hard and it is sometimes hard to find work.

Many of the workers for the new shellfish exporting and processing facilities live at Zarubino. They have injected life back into a dying town that was decaying because of the depletion of the the natural fish stocks. They are at the corner where three countries come together - Russia, Korea, and China. So the people in Kamchatka think they have a good future in exporting their seafood products to these countries and further beyond. Chinese investors are taking a great interest in the scallop farms. The cycle of the scallop is two years. The shell fish nurseries are deep under water and they have no buoys so they will not be robbed by poachers. There used to be a lot of unused stretches of coast line in China but they are all used up by aquaculture. The Chinese did not know you could grow scallops in the deep sea. They have only been farming shellfish for three years and it is an emerging business. They are ready to sell their first harvest which is sold live to overseas customers. The main foreign markets are Japan, China, and Korea.

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