| The country’s
fishing and aquaculture sectors are struggling to overcome serious
problems. The fishing industry is plagued by poaching which costs
millions of dollars a year, while the aquaculture sector fights to
regain respect on world markets after the antibiotic chloramphenicol was
detected in shrimp exports.
According to a statement released by
fishery officials earlier this week, foreign poachers took about one
million tonnes of fish from Indonesian territorial waters last year,
worth an estimated USD 400 million in lost revenue.
Heriynato Marwoto, secretary general of
the Marine Affairs Ministry, said fishermen caught almost four million
tonnes of fish last year, just four times the amount lost to poachers.
Meanwhile, Indonesia's shrimp farmers are
taking steps to ensure that exported shrimp are chloramphenicol free,
the Frozen Seafood Association of Indonesia (FSAI) said Monday.
Shrimp farmers are reportedly using High
Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) machines capable of testing for
antibiotics up to 0.1 parts per billion. The machines were donated to
government laboratories so all products could be screened.
FSAI officials said Health Certificates
would not be issued by the labs until the shrimp have been tested for
the antibiotic and cleared of it. In Indonesia, chloramphenicol is
banned from use in aquaculture feeds.
Back in 1999 the Indonesian Agricultural
Department planned to turn things around by doubling the land coverage
for shrimp farming. The plan, Protekan 2003 (Programme to Increase
Exports of Fisheries), would boost revenue from the fisheries sector to
USD 10 billion by 2003. Of that figure, an estimated USD 6.78 billion
would derive from shrimp exports, and shrimp export volume would
increase to approximately 677,800 tonnes.
Indonesia currently exports approximately
52,000 tonnes of shrimp per year and uses 360,000 hectares of land for
shrimp farming, according to the Third World Network. Indonesia is the
world’s second major shrimp exporter after Thailand with a nine per cent
share of the total shrimp exported: 128,800 metric tonnes worth USD 864
million in 1998, according to the
Gobefish 2001 Shrimp Analysis Report. |
