The Indonesian government is considering applying an international treaty to fight illegal fishing at more ports across the country, to gain better oversight of the all-important fishing industry.
Indonesia is a signatory to the 2009 Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA), the first binding international treaty to specifically target illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by stopping vessels engaging in the practices from accessing ports. But despite being the world’s largest archipelagic country and one of the top seafood producers, Indonesia has only implemented the PSMA at four ports. That’s far fewer than in Thailand, where 26 ports implement those measures.
The Indonesian ports that implement them are the three Samudra fisheries ports in Muara Baru, Jakarta; Bitung, North Sulawesi; and Bungus, West Sumatra; and the commercial port of Benoa in Bali.
“We should be having more,” Tri Aris Wibowo, the fisheries port director at the fisheries ministry, said at a press conference in Jakarta on May 16. “I think we at the fisheries ministry which oversees the fisheries ports must build a partnership with the public ports to implement the principles of the PSMA on the fishing vessels that dock at those public ports.”