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Social marketing, Indonesian fishermen and the sea by Taufiq Alimi and Toni Ruchimat June 05,2013   |  Source: Jakarta Post

Sarmin, a fisherman from Karimunjawa in Central Java, says that in the past few years he has had to venture farther and farther to find fish, but continues to bring home smaller and smaller catches. Now 45, Sarmin has been fishing since he was 17.

With an income of about US$2.50 a day from catching squid, Sarmin must support a family of three
children.

Sarmin’s story is a familiar one. Over the last decade, from Sabang to Papua, the fish stocks that feed Indonesia’s 240 million people have been rapidly dwindling.

In the Coral Triangle that covers around 647 million hectares of ocean in Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and the Philippines, at least 4.5 million people completely depend on fishing for their livelihoods, bringing in a catch worth US$9 billion each year.

In Indonesia and the Philippines alone, 10 million tons of fish protein are produced each year.

But stories like Sarmin’s add to a growing body of evidence that Indonesia is running out of marine life.

In one telling statistic, catch sizes by purse seine fishing boats based out of Jakarta’s main Muara Angke fishing port declined from 531.84 kilograms (kg) of fish per trip in 2001 to only 144.22 kg by 2005, according to a 2006 Bogor Institute of Agriculture

 

© PT. Bina Media Tenggara © 2012

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