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Foreign fishing boats modified to avoid detection: Ministry
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Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti carries out an impromptu inspection at the Benoa Port in Bali on Tuesday. The ministry found that some local boat companies had refurbished foreign fishing boats to make them look like local fishing boats by covering them with wood. (JP/Nurul Fitri Ramadhani)
D
uring an impromptu inspection of Benoa Port in Bali, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti has claimed that dozens of fishing boats formerly owned by foreign companies had seemingly disappeared from the country's waters.
In order to evade inspection, she said, some local boat companies had refurbished foreign fishing boats, which are usually made from fiberglass, to look like local fishing boats by covering them with wood.
The boats were supposed to leave Indonesian waters after the 2014 moratorium on foreign fishing vessel permits ended on Oct. 31 last year. When the moratorium was first imposed, there were 152 former foreign vessels prohibited from fishing in Benoa, 134 of them from Taiwan and eight from China. The rest were from Japan, Belize, Thailand and Vietnam. However, as of July 2016, the ministry's illegal fishing prevention task force (Satgas 115) found that only 63 were left.
"Instead of carrying them back to their countries of origin, the owners of the boats have modified them to look like local boats, so that they can still operate in our waters, which is against the law," Susi said on Tuesday at the one of the biggest ports in central Indonesia.
Mohammad Rohani, 47, a worker at the port, admitted that hundreds of fiberglass boats had been modified, but said he did not know that it was illegal, and that he only carried out the instructions of the local boat company he worked for. "The modification of one boat can take months," he added. (dmr)
