Indonesian Fishing Vessel Monitoring System

The Republic of Indonesia develops an 81,000 kilometers coastline with a maritime territory of 5.8 million km2.  The potential resource is estimated at over 6 million tons per year out of which only 60% is exploited.  Illegal catch is estimated to be on the order of 2 billion dollars.  In order to guarantee the sustainability and the perennity of its resources, and to better protect it, the government of Indonesia has decided to implement a Fishing Vessel Monitoring System.  This project is developed within the framework of the Law No 9/185 about fisheries and its technical decrees N0 142/2000, 42/2001, 47/2001.

The operator of the VMS unit remains the Ministry of Fisheries.  Data will be processed and analyzed in Jakarta then transferred to regional offices.  Each fishing company will have the possibility to access its own fleet's data.  The government of Indonesia is interested in identifying the nature and the geographical location of resources in Indonesian waters in order to implement a program of protection and management. Data transmitted by the fleet are: position, date and time and catch report.

Two other VMS providers are approved in addition to Argos: Inmarsat D+ and PSN Garuda.  The main reasons why Argos has been selected by the Ministry of Fisheries of Indonesia are:
- The Ministry wishes to continue to use Argos since it provides a better integrity of data thanks to its unique Doppler-based positioning system.
- Vessels characteristics: Indonesian fishing fleet is mostly based on vessels which can supply very little power to any onboard electronics equipment. Extensive trials have been done with different systems, and it became clear that Argos transmitters were working operationally on every type of Indonesian vessel.
- Ease of use: Argos transmitters are simple to operate for non specialized crews. Argos data, which are automatically downloaded to the Ministry's monitoring centre are easy to analyze for all the Ministry's personnel.