RIYADH: The Red Sea Development Company (TRSDC) is actively working with local communities by recruiting, training and educating people on sustainability, TRSDC and Amaala CEO John Pagano told Arab News.
The company has hired around 2,000 local people including contractors and is training people in vocational jobs and for management roles, he said in an interview on the sidelines of the FII held in Riyadh this week.
“We try to prioritize people that come from the region, get priority when we select our candidates,” he said.
The company is also working with local communities trying to identify business opportunities for them, Pagano added.
On the agriculture side of things, the company is helping farmers to be more organized and educated and to “learn more how to manage pests and use more environmentally sound and friendly solutions to deal with pests, grow more organic foods and give them an outlet so we can become a purchaser of them,” he explained.
Pagano said there will be no overdevelopment as this would damage what makes the place so unique and special.
“We have established what we believe to be our ecological ceiling and we’re going to work within that,” he said. “Even though I have the size of a country, a land area the size of a country, as big as Belgium, we’re only going to develop a very small percentage of that,” he told Arab News.