KARAWANG/JAKARTA, Indonesia — At 55, Warno has spent the past quarter of a century making a living from a fish farm that he manages in Karawang district, in the Indonesian province of West Java. Here, in ponds spanning a combined 2 hectares (5 acres), he raises milkfish and shrimp, and grows seaweed. “Every year, I have to spend a considerable amount of money to start over after the harvest,” he tells Mongabay Indonesia. “There also has to be regular maintenance to keep the pond water in good condition.” Crucially, Warno doesn’t own the land his fish farm sits on; he rents it from PT Perhutani, a government-owned company. That makes him one of many small-scale fish farmers along the northern Java coast who say they fear losing the land under a new government plan to revitalize what it calls “idle” state-owned aquafarms covering 78,000 hectares (about 193,000 acres) across the region. Fish farms like this one in Karawang district are managed by both small-scale farmers and businesses. The latter typically control dozens of hectares, while small farmers usually manage less than 5 hectares (12 acres) each. Image by M. Ambari/Mongabay Indonesia. Indonesia’s fisheries minister, Sakti Wahyu Trenggono, has described the program as a key strategy to support the government’s national food security agenda. The first phase covers some 20,400 hectares (50,400 acres) of ponds along most of West Java’s northern coast. Most of these are what the ministry terms “unproductive”: managed using traditional methods, lacking water reservoirs and wastewater treatment…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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