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.
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 trapClimate 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 nationAs 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.”ExportsIndonesia supplies a quarter of all fish
