The Indonesian Tuna Consortium is working directly with the Southeast Asian nation’s seafood supply chain, as well as other stakeholders, to create a more resilient, efficient, and equitable fishing ecosystem across the archipelago.
The consortium – a group of organizations comprising MDPI, YKAN, Marine Change, Fair Trade USA, and the International Pole & Line Foundation – aims to ensure responsible management of the country’s marine resources and, in turn, fishers’ access to responsible tuna resources well into the future.
“We try to be a catalyst for change by working with multiple stakeholder groups – governments, communities, fishers, regional fishery management organizations, and international NGOs – to work through some of the real-world challenges of developing and implementing harvest strategies in Indonesia,” said Thilma Komaling, the Indonesia Tuna Consortium strategic lead at Burlington, Vermont, U.S.A.-based consultancy firm Resonance. “As an example, in our constellation of organizations, we have representatives from purse-seiner and pole-and-line operations who bring very different perspectives on some issues, but we have to include diverse insights so we can build strategies that will work for everyone.”
Resonance works with clients to create and scale inclusive market-based solutions to critical climate, social, and sustainability challenges and is managing some of the consortium’s work, helping to guide some of the strategy.
Regarding the consortium’s collaboration with government officials, it has worked closely with the government of Indonesia to develop and implement the Harvest Strategy for Tropical Tuna Fisheries in Indonesia Archipelagic Waters, also known as the IAW Harvest Strategy.
The consortium’s work on the IAW Harvest Strategy mainly focused on liaising with those outside the supply chain – where the industry has the least leverage to drive change.
On 8 June 2023, which was World Oceans Day, the Indonesian Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF) published the Tuna IAW Harvest Strategy, which outlines how Indonesia plans to reduce total catch volume by 10 percent from 2021 catch levels.
The Tuna Consortium worked closely with MMAF and the National Research and Innovation Agency to support the finalization and launch of the harvest strategy; the publication of the harvest strategy capped off a 10-year process, simultaneously launching the more difficult implementation phase of the work.
“Around 97 percent of fishers in Indonesia are small-scale and spread out across a large archipelago, so traditional regulatory approaches are almost impossible to implement,” Komaling said. “We have to embrace the challenge rather than force approaches on the fisheries that will not work. It is a learning curve – from the government's learning and understanding of how to support good management of fisheries with these unique challenges to a learning curve for the fishers to adopt good management practices.”
That challenge, like many fisheries around the world that are heavily composed of artisanal fishing, includes community buy-in on management strategies.
Supply chain pressure in the form of buyer requirements or preferences for verifiably sustainable seafood can be an important incentive for fishers to buy in, but the communities reliant on the ocean, especially in a country like Indonesia that is made up of several thousand isolated islands, can feel detached from the process and the governments implementing them. This, Komaling explained, generates an understandable reluctance to commit to the buy-in so necessary for proper management.
“We are working to support implementation of the harvest strategy in 16 provinces in the Indonesian archipelago, and each province has its own autonomy in managing local fishers and understanding the cultural context and perspective of political leaders,” Komaling said. “Understanding this context and perspective and getting local buy-in is the difference between a harvest strategy on paper and the adoption of good management practices on the water.”
Along with building political will and fisher and community buy-in, the consortium is also working to support more responsible fisheries by monitoring fish stocks, tracking fishing vessels, developing species-identification technology, and promoting rights-based management in small near-shore fisheries.
“Consortium members are quite creative in how they think about and understand the foundational problems in small-scale fisheries,” Komaling said. “It is one thing to improve the management of the stocks, but to deliver a responsible product to market, we also need to tackle poverty, improve financial literacy in communities, and promote hygienic fish-handling practices at the start of the supply chain.”
With the harvest strategy implemented, the consortium is now turning its attention to the marketplace.
“As we begin to develop a market strategy … we want to build on existing efforts. We also want to support existing electronic catch documentation or traceability programs companies are already using to make adoption easier,” said Kelvin Gorospe, the senior technical associate of fisheries and natural resource management at Resonance.
Though the work has largely turned toward the marketplace, the dialogue with fishers and other stakeholders carries on.
“As part of the platform, there is a space where fishers can speak their minds and voice their opinions, including a program called Fisher Champions,” Komaling said. “We have 113 champions across eight provinces. The idea is to spark discussion around these issues through public speaking, leadership, and innovation so fishers can help shape implementation rather than just being victims of regulation.”
