Indonesian authorities have called on their counterparts in neighboring Singapore to crack down the illegal lobster larvae trade, given that the city-state is a key hub for the regional trade of the crustaceans.
Indonesia has since June 2021 banned exports of lobster seed in an effort to conserve declining wild stocks and tackle the illegal lobster market. But smuggling of the in-demand shellfish remains rampant, particularly via the country’s Riau Islands, less than an hour’s boat ride to Singapore. For its part, Singapore still permits the import of lobster larvae, not only to meet domestic demands but also to forward them to Vietnam and China, where the larvae are raised to maturity in fish farms and tanks and sold at much higher prices.
Smugglers’ most frequent tactic is to “escape from our authority by entering Singapore’s territorial waters,” Adin Nurawaluddin, director-general of marine and fisheries resources surveillance at the Indonesian fisheries ministry, said in a statement published Aug. 7.
The most recent case was reported in early July, when customs officers in Batam, the largest city in the Riau Islands, seized a shipment of nearly 50,000 lobster larvae, of the species Panulirus ornatus and P. homarus, bound for Singapore. The value of the shipment was estimated at 5.55 billion rupiah ($363,000). It was unclear where the larvae had come from, but authorities said they released them into the waters off Batam.
In August 2022, authorities seized lobster larvae worth 30 billion rupiah ($1.96 million) on a boat headed from the Riau Islands to Singapore. Another foiled shipment, worth 3.9 billion rupiah ($255,000), was impounded at Jakarta’s international airport in September, also destined for Singapore.