East Kalimantan Has March Deadline on Trawling Regulations

Jakarta Globe 11 Jan 09;

The East Kalimantan provincial government has until March to issue regulations related to the central government’s controversial decision to lift a ban on trawling by commercial fishing vessels, said Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Freddy Numberi on Friday.

“If we don’t see any progress by March, the decision to allow trawling will automatically become void,” Numberi in an interview with the Jakarta Globe.

A total of 1,299 vessels weighing as much as 30 gross tons each will be able to legally start trawling the waters off East Kalimantan Province as soon as the provincial government issues regulations.

A regulatory framework is key to ensuring that the provincial government effectively mitigates the social and environmental impacts of trawling, Numberi said.

Critics fear that trawling could lead to overfishing and hurt the livelihoods of thousands of traditional, small-scale fishermen struggling to make a living off the sea. Trawl nets have also come under fire from environmentalists due to the damage they can cause to the sea floor and the fact that they often snare both marketable and non-marketable fish, with the latter being dumped.

The provincial government needs to convince the ministry that it is legally prepared to protect the environment and safeguard the interests of small-scale fishermen.

The government is concerned that commercial fishing operations in Malaysia will use fishermen in East Kalimantan to secretly trawl in Indonesian waters on their behalf.

“There have been fears that trawling will only benefit vessels based in Malaysia, so we need to see regulations at the regional level to help allay these concerns,” Numberi said.

Numberi said in April that a licensing system was needed to prevent illegal fishing by large Malaysian vessels in Indonesian waters.

“Malaysian vessels have an advantage in fishing our waters because they are equipped with trawl nets for deep-sea fishing, which our vessels lack,” he said.

Suhana, a marine biologist at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, or IPB, said small-scale fishermen cannot use trawl nets because their boats — which typically weigh a maximum of five gross tons in size — are too small to trawl. Usually, trawling vessels must be at 10 gross tons in size.

This is why the government needs to offer another justification for the lifting of the trawling ban, because trawling will not benefit small-scale fishermen, Suhana said.

“It’s impossible for small fishermen to trawl,” Suhana said. “An individual fishermen would need to spend at least Rp 100 million ($9,200) on average to obtain trawling equipment, which is well beyond the means of traditional fishermen.”

Maritime patrols are also necessary to monitor trawling in East Kalimantan. Aji Sularso, the ministry’s general director on the supervision of maritime resources, said the government provided the ministry with only Rp 73 billion from the 2008 state budget for patrols.

This was only enough to patrol coastal waters for 100 days last year, Aji said, leading to illegal fishing in the Natuna and Maluku regions.

“Ideally, we should be monitoring those waters at least 200 days a year,” he said.