In Indonesia, the world’s largest island country, small-scale fisheries are a vital source of nutrition and income for many communities. Yet nearly all small-scale fishingwhich makes up around 95 percent of Indonesia’s fishing sectoris unreported, making it difficult for the government to track and maintain the health of its marine resources.
Raymond Jakub, a program implementation manager at the conservation nonprofit Rare Indonesia and a 2017 Pew marine fellow, is developing a scalable catch recording system for small-scale fishers and the national government. Jakub discussed his work with The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Indonesia is a maritime country, so I had many opportunities to work in this area. Initially, I spent a lot of time learning and working directly on corals and reef fish. But then, as I spent more time in the field, I started to understand the importance of fisheries to people’s livelihoods. This pushed me to begin working with small-scale fisheries in these communities that have a lot of valuable local knowledge.
About 95 percent of our fisheries are small scale, which means their catch numbers can be huge when added together. But in Indonesia, it’s not mandatory for small-scale fishers to report their catch. The statistics we produce every year mostly come from the catches of marine fish landed in official domestic ports. But a lot of small-scale fisheries do not land their fish in these portsthey either bring it home or sell it locally or to middlemen.
Plus, until recently, to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, Indonesia was focusing on the illegal and unregulated part; the unreported part was still lacking the attention it deserved. So I started thinking about how to actually gather the catch numbers from these small-scale fisheries in an effective but participatory way. Because it’s important that these data are considered in fisheries management practices to achieve real sustainability. And bringing small-scale fisheries into the decision-making process is also important, because it allows fishers to share their local knowledge and historical experience.
Although they want more profitable fisheries, they know that tracking this information will not directly increase the value of the fish they sell or the number of fish in the water. But they do understand that by having these data, they will see trends and, as a result, will be able to better manage their fisheries. Management might mean that they need to change their gear, or agree on size limits, or understand what season they need to be aware of to protect fish populations.
Most of the resistance was linked to me introducing something new, a new behavior: reporting. Illiteracy is also a problem, because not everyone is familiar with writing, or they simply are not in the habit of recording things. But I also found champions who wanted to report their catch because they understand the long-term goals and benefits of monitoring.
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