President Jokowi: Educate Our Fishermen New Technologies

President Jokowi delivers his speech at the opening of the 2017 National Coordination Meeting on Maritime Affairs, at Sasana Kriya, TMII, East Jakarta, Thursday (4/5). (Photo: PR/Oji)

President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo argued that the economic potential of Indonesia’s marine and fishery sectors are very enormous worth US$1.33 trillion or equivalent to Rp19,000 trillion more. However, if the management is just routine, monotonous, and no breakthroughs are made, this figure cannot be reached. “10 percent is already good, let alone it has reached 19,000-20,000. It is such a big job. The potential is there but we have not paid our attention to this yet,” President Jokowi said in his speech at the opening of the 2017 National Coordination Meeting on Maritime Affairs, at Sasana Kriya, Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (TMII), East Jakarta, Thursday (4/5) morning.

President Jokowi emphasized the importance of mastery of science, technology, and research in marine and fishery sectors, which has not become the focus for decades. The President requested that the issue becomes our concern and so that we can find out the potentials of Indonesia’s marine resources, and what measures we should do about it.

In this regard, President Jokowi reminded the fishermen that they should not work with old patterns. We should dare to step into another world. “How long we have been dealing with cantrang (a modified type of trawl net) issue. Every year we are dealing with cantrang issue. We put so much attention on it which made us ignore the big strategy to the next level which has better added value,” the President said.

President Jokowi encouraged all to start talking about offshore aquaculture, given 70 percent more of our country is water, sea. The President likened Norway or Taiwan, which talk about offshore aquaculture every day. “Educate our fishermen to know what this is. The added value can be dozens of times what we are doing now. We should dare to make changes,” the President said.

According to the President, offshore aquaculture is not an expensive thing. He once asked one site costed Rp47 billion. President Jokowi suggested that if we cannot do it by ourselves, then cooperate with others so there will be transfer of knowledge. He reminded all that without doing so, we will never move forward. “Once again, I convey this many times, we are too monotonous, whereas the world changes very quickly,” the President stated.

The President reiterated that every meeting he always talks about Elon Musk, spacex, tesla, future cars, future outer space, hyperloop, human movement from one place to another. However, we are still dealing with cantrang. (UN/OJI/ES) (MUR/YM/Naster).