Tackling the Complexities of the Pearl Industry to Enhance Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

The pearl industry is millennia old yet remains a major contributor to the economies of countries at varying stages of development. Pearls offer gem quality durable goods as well as other byproducts such as pearl meat, mabe, art and craft products and environmental improvement in waterways where farmed sustainably. This makes pearls potentially highly sustainable. However, returns to scale can diminish rapidly. The pearl oyster industry, as opposed to freshwater mussel pearl production, is highly susceptible to environmental events such as storms and cyclones, increases in water temperature and trophic state.

As with many fisheries-related industries, those who create the value rarely capture much of that value. Extended global supply chains often mean that the margins are gained by those closer to the international retail markets that covet high-quality pearls. However, communities can gain positive and sustainable returns through the development of industries that employ low-capital, low-labor cost models. For round pearls, the need for highly skilled technicians to seed the nuclei in to the gonads of oysters is their greatest expense. However, solutions such as Mabe pearl production and the increasingly popular keshi pearls offer alternatives that can create returns without expensive technical skills, at least as a stepping stone to a sustainable industry.

Pearl oysters can offer an excellent opportunity for communities to build long-term revenue streams, including enhancing tourism and offering opportunities for women in business to support gender balance in community-based economies. The stages of production offer an industry model from spat collection (for wild populations, hatcheries for introduced), breeding, seeding, input supply, through to crafting, marketing, tourism and skills development and employent across a community. However, at the wholesale and retail end, it remains a highly concentrated industry. Ultimately, pearls offer the staged development of an industry; however, high-quality pearls must enter global markets which have been highly volatile in recent years. This volatility threatens the establishment of new pearl farms and industries in emerging economies.

The reality is that dichotomies abound in the pearl industry. The industry can be at once sustainable in terms of its environment, as well as exploitative. Similarly, pearling can be community-enhancing and community-destroying. Even species range from indigenous and appropriate to introduced and invasive. In the millennia-old pearl industry’s history, emerging from the Middle East, work and employment practices have ranged from bounteous to murderous. The dichotomy persists when we look at corporate structures across the industry from very small sole trader farms to large corporations embedded in and driving global supply chains. The distinction in scale tends to be shown in how output is calculated. Capital intensity ranges from farms with very low capital intensity to large-scale farms, and distributed industry models where a large number of small farms are coordinated by a single buying desk. 

Nonetheless, these dichotomities belie the complexity of an industry that generates some of the most valuable products in the world, yet remains inextricably embedded in the natural environment. Fundamentally, the question that pearl industries across the globe must answer is whether they are socially, environmentally, ethically, culturally, gender and even racially sustainable. The challenge in building a sustainable pearl industry is to navigate and embrace its complexities.

Purpose of this Special Issue:

No clear example exists of a pearl industry that is sustainable in its geographic and socioeconomic context. For pearl industries in Asia and the Indo-Pacific, sustainability can be curtailed by climate-change-related events, but these industries themselves have caused environmental and social disturbances that have limited their productive life. Because of their inextricable association with their environment, while producing gem quality durable goods, pearl production (outside of freshwater mussel pearls) faces greater complexities than most agricultural and extractive industries. Creating and sustaining pearl industries is fraught with myriad causes of failure. This leads to difficulties in establishing industry and business models that are transferable across time and geography. The purpose of this Special Issue then is to tackle the complex issues faced with solutions that are not reductionist but embrace the complexity of pearls and pearling. We invite contributions from a range of disciplines and domains, and particularly combinations of disciplines and domains that can offer not only analyses that account for complexity in the respective pearl industries they observe, but offer interesting robust solutions for those wishing to establish and maintain a sustainable pearl industry.

Prof. Damian Hine
Dr. Bill Johnston
Guest Editors

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• pearl
• oyster
• supply chain
• value creation
• value capture
• economic models
• financial models
• community
• environmental
• production scale
• industry model
• complexity
• socioeconomic
• transferability