Feisty fisheries and maritime minister Susi Pudjiastuti may have earned a reputation for blowing up hundreds of foreign fishing boats caught intruding in Indonesian waters, but with the national catch now again on the rise she is going one step further with plans to ban all exports of frozen fish.
Curled up in a chair in her official residence, the barefoot minister told Asia Times she was anxious to add more value to marine products, in line with broader efforts to boost manufacturing and improve sluggish economic growth.
Fishery exports in fact have risen by 7 per cent to USD 3.9 billion in the past two years, but more startling is the way Indonesia’s domestic fish consumption has soared by a whopping two million tons.
One Japanese processing company is already moving its base of operations from Thailand to Indonesia as the ban takes a 30 per cent bite out of Thai seafood exports, an indication of where most of that country’s actual catch comes from.
Pudjiastuti also wants to turn 12 ports, from Merauke in far southeast Papua to Sabang in northwest Aceh, into processing points for direct export to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Pulau, Japan and Australia.
But all that requires intra-government cooperation, and in Indonesia where bureaucratic reform is still a work in progress involving more than one ministry in a project is often a recipe for stagnation or outright failure.
It’s like a book. The first chapter was about destruction and she did that brilliantly, says former fisheries minister Sarwono Kusumaadmadja. The second chapter is about reconstruction and she is finding that to be whole new ball game.
Indonesia’s Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry, in cooperation with the Navy and the National Police, blew up and sank foreign fishing vessels. File image courtesy defense.pk
Kusumaadmadja initially served as Pudjiastuti’s policy adviser, but he says she has now forgotten how to listen just as she has taken to skipping Cabinet meetings in a show of frustration over the obstacles that stand in her way.
President Joko Widodo can hardly fire his most popular minister. But he may have been tempted by fears that her rules on environmentally-friendly nets now on hold were alienating the country’s four million small-scale coastal fishermen.
Out in deeper waters, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has found that apart from the damage done to marine habitats, anywhere up to 40 per cent of the fish caught in heavy trawl nets has little or no market value.
Pudjiastuti says she is still under pressure from the same politically-wired businessmen who previously benefited from the plundering of the nation’s resources, worried that her work could be undone by a new administration.
Up until she imposed a moratorium in 2014, more than 1,300 foreign fishing vessels, grouped under about 10 joint ventures with mostly Thai, Chinese and Vietnamese companies, were registered to operate in Indonesian waters. What a raspy-voiced, chain-smoking former fish trader with barely a high school education has achieved is stunning by any yardstick, but it’s almost beyond belief in a country where the elite always seems to prevail.
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