For the last few months Indonesia has been making a show of dramatically blowing up and sinking fishing boats from Vietnam that were illegally fishing in its waters. The crackdown has fueled the popularity of maritime affairs minister Susi Pudjiastuti, but environmentalists are not happy about the explosions, which could potentially cause major oil leaks and otherwise damage sensitive marine habitats, Quartz reports.
Though the government has been scuttling
such vessels for years, the latest campaign started in December, when
newly-elected president Joko Widodo’s government invited media to watch it
launch explosives at three Vietnamese ships that had been caught fishing in its
territorial waters. Numerous sinkings followed, including a Vietnamese vessel
on February 10.
“Camera crews filmed the boats going under
in clouds of black smoke, against the backdrop of picturesque islands,” the
Wall Street Journal reported in December. And it’s the presence of the black
smoke—indicating burning oil— that worries some environmentalists, along with
other disruptions to those very same picturesque islands.
“The use of explosives to sink the boat
disturbs and threatens the fish near the location of the explosion—in a way, it
has the same effect as using dynamite to catch fish,” Greenpeace campaigner
Arifsyah Nasution told the Jakarta Globe. In addition, she said, debris from
the boats turns into floating garbage.
The Globe reported that there was “no
indication that the Navy properly cleans out the vessels of their highly
polluting diesel and bunker oil before sinking them.”
The government has stubbornly persisted
with its campaign, due in part to the positive attention it has received from
foreign media outlets. Last week the Guardian said the latest sinking “reflects
one of the biggest success stories in marine conservation,” citing efforts in
the protected area near the Raja Ampat islands, off West Papua. To be fair,
most of that enforcement has taken the form of seizing, not sinking, violators’
vessels.
The sinkings have also been a boon to the
popularity of Susi, the Indonesian maritime minister, who this month earned a
cabinet-best approval rating of 61 percent. She claimed in January that the sinking
campaign has led to a 90 percent reduction in illegal vessels operating in
Indonesia’s waters. And Widodo has said Indonesia was left with little choice
but to take a hard line, as more than 5000 illegal vessels operated in the
country’s waters every day prior to the crackdown.
The environmentalists are not asking the
government to stop its crackdown, and haven’t even called for an end to the
sinking of illegal ships. But they want to see it employ greener practices,
including draining the ships of fuel oil and other pollutants, and sinking them
in water deeper than 40 meters, to avoid harming coral.
The end result may not make for such a
dramatic media event, but the fish will probably appreciate the effort.
Read the article HERE.
The Aquaculturists
This blog is maintained by The Aquaculturists staff and is supported by the
magazine International Aquafeed which is published by Perendale Publishers Ltd
For additional daily news from aquaculture around the world: aquaculture-news
No comments:
Post a Comment