Fisherwomen on the north coast of Indonesia’s Java Island are leading the fight against the government’s decision to dredge sea sand for export, warning the activity may exacerbate the impacts of rising sea levels and marine ecological degradation.
In May 2023, the Indonesian government issued a regulation that allowed sand extracted from the seabed to be sold abroad, ending a 20-year-old ban on exporting dredged sea sand.
The decision was immediately met with widespread criticism, even though officials, including President Joko Widodo himself, claimed the dredging would only take place in open-water marine areas where “natural sedimentation” had occurred, while coastal areas and small islands would be off-limits to the activity.
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries issued a follow-up decree, designating seven locations for sea dredging. These sites — mostly in the Natuna Islands off Sumatra, East Kalimantan province in Borneo, and the north Java coast, known as Pantura — cover a combined area about 590,000 hectares (1.45 million acres). The decree would allow up to 17.65 billion cubic meters (623 billion cubic feet) of sand to be extracted.
“When we learned that Demak [in Pantura] has been designated [for dredging], we were stunned,” Masnuah, 50, founder of the Puspita Bahari Fisherwomen’s Community in Central Java province, told Mongabay in a recent interview.
According to the ministerial decree, 1.72 billion m3 (60.7 billion ft3) of sea sand, or nearly a tenth of the total allocated nationwide, may be dredged from waters spanning 57,438 hectares (141,932 acres) off Demak district, where Masnuah and many other fishing households live. This is in addition to four other sites dotted along the Pantura coast, from Karawang district in West Java to the city of Surabaya in East Java.
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It’s nonsense to claim that the sea sand business will make fishers prosperous, because it’ll likely create socioecological damage and losses.
Muhamad Karim, director, Center for Marine Development and Maritime Civilization Studies
The marine affairs ministry previously said the extracted sand may be exported as long as producers can ensure domestic supplies for reclamation work and other infrastructure development projects, particularly for the construction and expansion of ports, and also the new capital city of Nusantara. The ministry’s decree, however, shows that total domestic demand amounts to just 2.4 per cent of the total volume allowed to be dredged.
Victor Gustaaf Manoppo, the ministry’s head of marine zoning, was quoted as saying that 71 companies had requested a permit within two weeks of the issuance of the ministerial decree. He added the ministry received applications to dredge a combined 26 million m3 (918 million ft3) of sand this year alone.
“This policy, just like other development projects, is for the stakeholders in power and the investors,” Masnuah said. “It clearly won’t benefit any coastal communities.”
Strong opposition to sea sand extraction has also come from Jepara district, adjacent to Demak, even though the ministry hasn’t designated it as one of the dredging sites. Tri Ismuyati, 44, who initiated the Jepara branch of Indonesian Fisherwomen’s Union (PPNI), said the dredging site in Demak appeared to stretch all the way to the waters off the beach where she lives.
“Learning about the current dredging plan is quite traumatic,” Tri told Mongabay, adding that her fishing community had been instrumental in thwarting coastal sand mining projects in 2012 led by the companies PT Pasir Rantai Emas and CV Guci Emas Nusantara; both companies ceased operations the following year.
According to Tri, no one from the district or national governments had informed them about the new policy and dredging location, which she said she could see from her coastal village. She said she could only imagine how detrimental it would be to local fishers should dredging be allowed in the same waters from which they make a living.
“So what’s going to happen to us then? We can’t do other jobs besides fishing,” she said. “Ninety per cent of us here are fishers, only a few people are farmers with land.”
Tri, though not a fisherwoman herself, is still reliant on the industry; her husband and son are both fisherman, and she processes what they catch into fish rolls and paste to sell.
She said her community would fight against the government’s dredging plans as fiercely as they did against the private sand miners in 2012, even though the opposition back then resulted in 15 community members, including three women, facing criminal charges.
Tri is one of an estimated 2.7 million Indonesians employed in marine fisheries, most of them small-scale fishers. Under the business-as-usual scenario, the country’s marine capture fishery is projected to grow at an annual rate of 2.1 per cent from 2012-2030. Data from the marine affairs ministry show that the average total catch over the past five years was 7 million metric tons annually, valued at up to 140 trillion rupiah (US$8.95 billion).
The marine affairs ministry says the dredging this time around won’t target coastal sand but rather “seabed sediment” that has built up over time and become an obstacle to shipping traffic. Indonesia hosts three of the world’s busiest commercial maritime passageways — the straits of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok — and sits at the crossroads of two oceans (the Indian and Pacific) and two continents (Asia and Australia).
However, marine observers opposing the sea sand export policy say that dredging the “natural sedimentation” would likely deteriorate ocean health, particularly in terms of changing currents and affecting waves and increasing the potential for coastal abrasion.
The rapid development and expansion of ports across the country have intensified ecological degradation and social disruptions in the affected areas, directly impacting the livelihoods of fishers, small-scale traders, and families living in coastal villages and small islands, experts say.
“It’s nonsense to claim that the sea sand business will make fishers prosperous, because it’ll likely create socioecological damage and losses,” Muhamad Karim, director of the Center for Marine Development and Maritime Civilization Studies, an independent research institute, said at a recent public discussion in Jakarta.
Karim said previous cases of coastal and offshore dredging across Indonesia harmed the local fishers and communities. He cited the case of South Sulawesi province, where dredging activity sparked fierce resistance from local fishers. The community blamed them for disrupting their traditional fishing grounds, leading to a decline in catches of up to two-thirds since dredging began in February 2021.
“These policies are not the solution to manage and resolve the problems of sedimentation at sea,” Karim said. “They are acts of human exploitation and extractivism in upstream and coastal areas that enter marine waters. These policies must be revoked as they will add problems in the country.”
In addition to the potential for ecological damage, some experts have also warned that exporting extracted sea sand would lead to economic losses. The Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), another research institute, estimated that while the state could potentially earn the equivalent of US$10.9 million in export revenue, and the dredging companies US$32.1 million in profits, the potential losses to fishing communities could amount to US$77.4 million.
“CELIOS’s economic modelling confirms that the narrative that marine sand mining will significantly increase exports and government revenues is false,” Nailul Huda, the centre’s economics director, said in a press release. “The state revenue generated will not compensate for the overall losses.”
The modelling also warned of potential job losses of up to 36,400 in the fisheries sector, with virtually no jobs created by the dredging activity as it’s a capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive industry.
The dredging also threatens Indonesia’s marine carbon storage, CELIOS said. The country has the capacity to sequester an estimated 3.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide in its various marine ecosystems, or 17 per cent of the global total of so-called blue carbon. The government plans to include this vast store in its carbon-trading policy, but this would be undermined by dredging activity, according to Bhima Yudhistira, executive director of CELIOS.
“If marine sand exploitation continues, Indonesia will lose its blue carbon potential and blue economy ecosystem,” he said in the press release.
Back on the Pantura coast, fisherwomen Masnuah and Tri say they’ll continue to resist the dredging plans while also calling on the authorities at the local and national levels to focus on offering solutions to the impacts of climate crisis and coastal degradation that are already happening along Java’s north coast.
Many communities in Demak have been submerged due to a combination of land subsidence, coastal erosion and tidal flooding. In Jepara district, where Tri lives, the coastal and fishing communities have been fighting against the damage caused by a coal-fired power plant and coal spill from the barges carrying the fossil fuel by sea.
“My point is that people have to keep fighting,” Tri said. “We have to be brave.”
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
