Hao (French Polynesia)

Atoll in French Polynesia

Hao Airport is in the island's north. It is used as a base by Air Tahiti, the domestic airline of French Polynesia.

During the 1960s, the Pacific Experimental Center base generated most of the atoll's economic activity. The infrastructures built during these years are numerous: a major airfield with a 3,380 m runway (classified by NASA as an emergency landing strip in case of a technical problem with the space shuttle Columbia), a cargo port, a 15 km road, desalination units, electric generators and a hospital.

Since 2000, the atoll's private sector activities have been mainly related to pearl farming, fishing (with the export to Tahiti of about ten tons of seafood per year) and copra harvesting. On August 23, 2017, Chinese businessman Wang Cheng, chairman of Tahiti Nui Ocean Foods, announced in Papeete his intention to invest €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) to create an aquaculture farm on Hao that could produce up to 50.000 tons per year of lagoon fish (mainly groupers and humphead wrasse, but also sea cucumbers) for export. The French Polynesian government supports the project, which has been five years in the making, and which, according to its promoter, should allow the theoretical creation of nearly three hundred jobs during the thirty months of construction, and five hundred jobs (90% of which should be attributed to Polynesians) from the start of operations, allowing the diversification of the economic activity of the atoll, depopulated since the withdrawal of the French army. Some earthworks were carried out in March 2018, but the works, which were to be completed in 2020, are regularly postponed. On the one hand, many questions are being raised about the environmental impact of the project, which is causing concern among many elected representatives. In addition, on February 25, 2020, the director of the company in charge of the work was given a three year suspended prison sentence for forgery. In December 2019, Wang Cheng was heard by investigators under the open hearing system as part of a preliminary investigation into suspicions of "abuse of social assets" initiated in January 2019 by the investigation section (SR) of the Papeete gendarmerie.

Hao airfield hosts, on average, about 800 flights and between 12 and 15,000 passengers per year, 30% of whom are in transit. The municipality also hosts a secondary school for the children of the southern Tuamotu and Gambier atolls, as well as, for the past few years, the Center for Education in Appropriate Technologies for Development (CETAD), a vocational training institute specialized in sea related professions. Most of the teachers come from metropolitan France for a period of two to four years. Hao acquired a modern desalination plant in 2005. Electricity is permanently supplied by generators (EDT ELECTRA). In 2006, the municipality was equipped with street lighting powered by two wind turbines and solar panels. Finally, the landing of the Natitua submarine cable and its commissioning in December 2018 allows Hao to be connected to Tahiti and to the global high speed Internet.