Ahmad Solihin used to can tuna; now he drives a cab.
Like many Indonesians, the 28-year-old is a victim of overfishing and climate change, twin forces that have hobbled what was once a thriving industry.
The tuna catch is down, retail prices are unreliable and thousands of jobs have gone as the fishing industry takes a hit, with all parts of the sector affected.
It was in late 2023 that Solihin realised he had to change tack and get out of the fish business if he was ever to support his fast-growing family.
“As the fish catch declined, my employer couldn’t gain profits and eventually I couldn’t get an additional income,” Solihin, who now works as an online taxi driver, said in the coastal city of Bitung . “So I decided to leave.”
He hasn’t looked back.
At the fish processing plant where he had worked for about two years, Solihin earned IDR2,500,000 (US$153) a month, below the minimum wage, and had to top up his wages with overtime.
It still wasn’t enough to pay rent and support his wife and three-year-old son.
Now he earns about IDR4,500,000 (US$300) driving locals and tourists around the scenic city of Bitung, one of the nation’s largest fishing ports, whose official symbol is the skipjack tuna.
Bitung is home to more than 100 fish processing facilities, which export processed fish across Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.
The fisheries sector employs more than 3.2 million people - about 1.15 per cent of the total population, according to the Ministry of Maritime and Fisheries.
Indonesia is the world’s No. 2 seafood producer after China, harvesting almost 25 million tons of fish in 2022.
But the country has failed to meet its own target in recent years, with fishery production contributing just 2.6 per cent of the country’s GDP, far below the government target of 4 per cent.
Fish processing output has also fallen, from 70 tons per day in 2014 to 40 tons per day in 2023, according to Bitung fishery officials, leading to 14,000 job losses in the same period.
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Climate crisis and environmental destruction due to extractivism and industry have caused this decline. As extreme weather patterns frequently occur, this brings socio-economic impacts that force fishers to look for jobs elsewhere.
Parid Ridwanuddin, ocean campaign manager, WALHI
Poverty trap
Climate change has forced many fish to seek out colder waters, and rising global temperatures have also changed the weather patterns that dictated the traditional fishing season.
Warjono said he first noticed the change about seven years ago, when he could no longer rely on his daily haul of tuna or groupers to support his family of three.
The 52-year-old fisherman from Pekalongan, in Central Java, used to catch at least a ton of fish during a trip, at times venturing as far afield as Natuna Sea near Malaysia for fishing expeditions that lasted weeks.
But as weather patterns became harder to predict, his haul more than halved in the same waters.
“If you can’t predict the weather and wind direction, just like our grandfathers did in the past, it means you can’t predict the catch,” said Warjono.
“Our living expenses soar up, everything is expensive nowadays, but our catch declines. So we have to take loans, sometimes for operational costs or for our families back home.”
Fishing nation
As a maritime country, about 7 million Indonesians depend on the fishery sector, according to the World Bank.
Yet government data says more than 10 per cent of the coastal population live in poverty.
The number of Indonesians who fish for a living has fallen from 2.16 million in 2010 to 1.83 million in 2019, according to WALHI, an environmental, non-governmental organisation.
“Climate crisis and environmental destruction due to extractivism and industry have caused this decline,” said Parid Ridwanuddin, ocean campaign manager at WALHI.
“As extreme weather patterns frequently occur, this brings socio-economic impacts that force fishers to look for jobs elsewhere.”
Exports
Indonesia supplies a quarter of all fish sold in the world, but its fishing grounds are also deemed ‘fully exploited’ due to overfishing, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), a global non-profit research organisation.
It exported more than 91,000 tons of fish in 2012, but that fell to about 48,000 tons in 2023, data shows.
Secretary General Nyoman Sudarta of the Indonesian Longline Tuna Association (ATLI) - a body that represents tuna catchers - said Indonesia began catching smaller fish to compensate.
As the fish stock dwindled, so too did the number of boats.
In Benoa Bay, Bali - one of the largest fishing ports in Indonesia - the number of tuna fishing vessels topped 1,000 in 2009 and had fallen to just 275 this year, said Sudarta.
“Because the operational costs keep increasing, while tuna is getting more difficult to catch,” he said.
Climate crisis
Fishermen like Kastolani have long felt the impact of climate change on their catch.
The 50-year-old captain of a tuna fishing vessel in Benoa Bay said he used to catch 40 to 60 tons of tuna each month, but now that haul has halved.
As the catch dwindled, Kastolani watched as his crew members struggled to cope, growing steadily poorer.
To break even, Kastolani said they had no choice but to work 12-hour days and embark on even longer voyages to chase the vanishing fish, often working the seas for months on end.
For all that, he said his crew still only took home an average salary of IDR 1.8 million each month.
“Maybe it’s due to increasing temperatures,” he said. “If the ocean’s temperature is too hot, they (the fish) will be migrating to cooler areas or worse, dying off.”
Now the government is intervening to prop up fishing communities whose income has dwindled.
Last year, the government introduced a Measured Fishing policy - expected to kick in next year - aimed at capping the permitted catch in six designated fishing zones.
The aim: to restore marine ecosystems by regulating the fishing season, as well as boosting fishing revenues, according to Lotharia Latif, director general of a government body called Capture Fisheries at the Maritime and Fishery Ministry.
The aim, said Latif, was to “protect the resource and the industry itself”.
This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
This story was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit https://www.context.news/.
