A middle-aged man rests shirtless in a hut in the middle of the pond. He doesn’t seem to care about the raging sun. The breeze from the sea lulled him to sleep. He is Aribin, a milkfish farmer on Mengare Island, Gresik, East Java.
“Although the heat feels like hell, I like the dry season,” says the man known as Cak Bin. “Especially when the conditions are dry and the breeze is like this. My oh my, life feels peaceful.”
For Cak Bin, the dry season is a time of peace because he doesn’t have to worry about the ever-present threat of flooding. In addition, only during the dry season can he easily predict the milkfish harvest schedule.
“If I could choose, I would prefer the dry season throughout the year. Yes, rain is fine, but only for a short while,” Cak Bin says with a chuckle. “But if it rains heavily, oh my! I feel nervous like I could get a heart attack.”
Cak Bin had a bitter experience during the rainy season. It happened in early May 2022.
At that time, it was five days after Eid al-Fitr. Cak Bin was sleeping on the bamboo deck around the pond. Someone shouted to wake him up. The first sight he saw when he woke up was a terrified face of a friend.
“Cak Bin, the water is rising! The water is rising!” Cak Bin mimicked his friend. When he turned towards the sea, his eyes were greeted by huge waves that he estimated to be two meters high heading towards the pond. He saw that the bamboo barrier between the waves and the sea had collapsed.
The water had swallowed the beach and everything in its path. The sea was only a stone’s throw away from where he stood. In a short time, the sea passed through the embankment and swallowed up all the milkfish ponds that he managed.
Cak Bin was stunned for a moment. When he regained consciousness, he grabbed his bicycle and rushed home. Along the way, his thoughts drifted to the fate of his family back home. He also wanted to arrive as soon as possible to inform the villagers to be alert. Thoughts of the village being threatened with drowning plagued his heart. Time seemed to move slowly and his heart shrank as he pedaled closer to home.
“The entire path has been flooded. The distance between the pond and the embankment is already invisible. If I didn’t know the terrain, I would have fallen in,” recalls Cak Bin.
When he arrived home, he was relieved that the abrasion had not drowned his village.
At first, Cak Bin did not know that the incident was the result of sea abrasion. Instead, he thought the sudden rise in seawater was a sign that a tsunami would hit his village. Despite living there, he admitted that he had never witnessed such ferocious waves.
“My heart still cringes when I remember it. The water was so high, it was like Mengare was about to sink. The sound [of the waves] was thunderous, even though the sky was brightly lit,” recalls Cak Bin.
This man is known to Mengare villagers as one of the senior milkfish farmers. He has been helping his parents manage the ponds since he was 10. He was forced to quit school due to financial difficulties and chose to work in the pond with his father.
“I have been a milkfish farmer for more than fifty years, but the flood in 2022 was the worst. [and] I lost everything,” said Cak Bin.
Impact of Abrasion: Loss and Debt
Mengare is a tiny island located at the northern mainland tip of the city of Gresik. It covers about 1,700 hectares and is administratively located in Bungah sub-district, Gresik, East Java. It is surrounded by rivers and only separated by a three-kilometer-wide strait from Madura Island. Although small, the name Mengare is familiar when talking about milkfish farming.
Mengare milkfish often tops the Bandeng Kawak event, a jumbo milkfish auction held annually in Gresik. In 2021, for example, Zainal Arifin, a resident of Mengare, won the contest by exhibiting a milkfish weighing 6,5 kilograms. At the auction, the milkfish sold for 25,5 million rupiah.
However according to Cak Bin, after the abrasion that wiped out 800 hectares of milkfish ponds, this history is unlikely to be repeated. Based on research by Kurniawan and Efendy (2020), from 2014 to 2018 Mengare was one of the areas affected by severe sea abrasion. In five years, the coastline of the island had shrunk by half a kilometer.
Not only did abrasion affect livestock, but it has also trapped Cak Bin and other milkfish farmers with debts.
“After being hit by abrasion, the pond was out of the game for more than a year, and for the first four months, we couldn’t even work. This is because the pond was at sea level. The fish ran away. Finally, I scavenged the remains. We sold some and got around 5 million rupiah. That’s enough for us to live from May to August 2022,” said Cak Bin.
Not only affecting livestock, sea abrasion has also trapped Cak Bin and other milkfish farmers with debts. Roughly, Cak Bin has lost hundreds of millions of rupiah.
“In six months, we need about 500 sacks of fish feed. One sack cost 275,000 rupiahs. Not to mention the cost of repairing the pond which is also not cheap. I don’t know when I will be able to pay it off,” said Cak Bin.
As reported by Mongabay, pond farmers in Mengare need at least 500 sacks of milkfish feed daily. If calculated at a price of around 275,000 rupiahs, their losses are around 137 million rupiahs. Before the abrasion, they had managed the ponds for more than four months. The money, not including seed capital, vanished into thin air.
Aside from that, pond farmers who rent land like Cak Bin must also replace the lost land. Of the eight hectares of ponds he manages, there is one hectare that can no longer be used as ponds because it is parallel to the sea and impossible to fix.
“But the landowner doesn’t care. That is already my business. He only knows that I rented eight hectares. Later, the land must be returned intact. The debts are piling up.”
Cak Bin is just one of dozens of milkfish farmers who have suffered similar misfortune. The majority of Mengare residents, if not becoming factory workers, they farm milkfish.
“I remember that my neighbors’ faces were all frowning. We didn’t talk to each other, but we knew that all of us were in debt and didn’t know how to pay,” he chuckles.
During the successive misfortunes, Cak Bin said, not a single bit of help was provided by the government. Even though the circulation of money in Mengare in one day is worth hundreds of millions rupiah, he considers the state indifferent to its fate. The government’s promises to provide a wave breaker are just a figment of their imagination. Despite repeated surveys by various government agencies, nothing ever came out of it.
“Since the Soeharto era, many times we have changed mayors, governors, we have been promised wave breakers. But look, until now there is nothing,” explained Cak Bin.
The impact of abrasion has never fully recovered. Cak Bin says that the quality of the pond soil has also declined due to seawater contamination that has settled for a long time. He finds it difficult to manage the water even though he has tried various methods.
Mengare residents still believe in the old ways passed down from generation to generation by their ancestors. For example, Cak Bin doesn’t believe in the quality of urea fertilizer to restore nutrient content in the soil. Instead, they prefer to use fertilizer made from the api-api leaves (Avicennia) that grow around the island.
Mengare pond farmers usually use fertilizer made from chopped api-api leaves, which are mixed with twig bark and then dried. They used this formula to sterilize seawater and make the water clear. After abrasion, the recipe no longer worked. He was forced to add urea to speed up the pond water purification process.
“The impact is that the fish can’t be as big as before. Maybe because of the chemical content. It is no longer pure. Managing water becomes very difficult,” explained Cak Bin.
After the 2022 abrasion event, Cak Bin said that his harvest shrank. If in previous years he could produce around six to eight tons per harvest, lately his pond has only been able to produce four to five tons of milkfish.
The main factor in the shrinking yield is that they have to ‘force harvest’ their milkfish. Whereas they used to be free to keep the fish for seven to eight months, for fear of abrasion, the majority of farmers harvest their fish within six months. As a result, fish growth cannot be maximized.
The poor quality of the fish also affects the selling price. If the best quality milkfish is usually bought for 33,000 rupiahs, Cak Bin’s last harvest was sold in the market for 25,000 rupiahs.
“Especially after abrasion, fish are easily stressed. So, the need for feed has also increased. The cost of feed has increased, but the selling price has plummeted.”
Pollution and Regeneration Crisis
Time passes so quickly. Cak Bin calculates that the dry season is coming to an end. The frequent clouds signaled that the rainy season would soon arrive. Anxiety came back to haunt him. This means that the period he calls the calm season will also end. He must struggle with the unpredictable nature of the water.
“I see what happened in 2022 as the beginning. It could be that the following years will be worse because after that incident there were no preventive measures. Meanwhile, if we build a wavebreaker ourselves, where will the money come from? Last year’s loss has not been covered,” said Cak Bin.
The rainy season does not only bring the threat of abrasion. Toxins emanating from the chimneys of dozens of factories in Gresik also kill hundreds of milkfish seedlings (nener).
According to Cak Bin’s testimony, every time it rains he will find foam-like froth covering the surface of the pond water. After that, the milkfish seedlings are usually stressed and some would be found dead at the edge of the pond. Such a phenomenon occurs at least four times each year. Each time the pungent-smelling foam arrives, hundreds of milkfish seedlings will fall victim.
“It usually descends like a fog. The color is thick and the smell makes your throat feel choked. When that happens, the small fish will die. It happens more and more often every day. I don’t know what it contains,” said Bin.
In addition, Cak Bin thinks that the appearance of the ‘black fog’ also hampers the growth of milkfish. Based on the author’s investigation, the fog is thought to have come from ammonia gas (NH3) emitted by factories in the Gresik area. The suspicion leads to a petrochemical factory, which uses ammonia as one of the raw materials for urea fertilizer production.
Based on research by Firmansyah, Khambali, Koerniasari (2020), the PT Petrokimia Gresik factory is one of the actors spreading ammonia in Gresik air. The results showed that the average concentration of ammonia gas in Gresik was 6.6 mg/m3, while the highest concentration reached 9.2 mg/m3 per day.
According to Royan, Solim, and Santunumurti (2019), ammonia is not only harmful to human lungs but also has the potential to pollute water quality, which then affects the growth of living things in it.
If it crosses the tolerance threshold, ammonia can inhibit the growth of aquatic creatures and, most fatally, cause death. This is because ammonia risks disrupting the oxygen-binding process in the blood and altering the pH levels in the blood of aquatic creatures. According to the study, the mortality rate in ponds with excessive ammonia levels is 5 – 20%.
“Maybe in 10 years, Mengare milkfish farm will only be history […]”
Cak Bin’s concern about the presence of ‘black fog’ has an explanation from these studies. The poison is a factor that in recent years has made the harvest no longer optimal. As a result, young people around Mengare are reluctant to continue the tradition of being milkfish farmers. The majority of them choose to work as factory laborers, which provides a more secure income and is far from the impact of abrasion.
“Let it be. Let them all become factory workers. Being a milkfish farmer in uncertain conditions like this is difficult. If there are no countermeasures from the government, the fate of the Mengare ponds is only a matter of time,” says Cak Bin as he takes a deep drag on the cigarette he has between his lips.
“Maybe in 10 years, Mengare milkfish farm will only be history. Everything will be flattened. Everything will be gone, swallowed by the sea.”
Text Editor: Kurniawan Adi Saputro
Translation: Astrid Reza
