The Fishing & Living team attended the 3rd Tuna Data Collection Committee meeting for the region North and South of Lombok and Sumbawa and the Alas Strait in Mataram, Lombok on the 31st of January. The committee is comprised of local government (Dinas), provincial government (DKP), the local University (University of Mataram), local suppliers and Anova Food. It is facilitated by the IMACS (Indonesian Marine and Climate Support) project of USAID. The objective of the committee is to bring the stakeholders of the local tuna fishery together to work towards improving the data collection in the region and to work through problems which the stakeholders see as obstacles to that mission.
Discussion points at this meeting included:
1) issues related to Handline fishermen from Lombok and Sumbawa having placed some rumpons outside of EEZ (exclusive economic zone), resulting in some potential conflicts with the Balinese purse seiners,
2) the lack of data on the location of the FADs (Fish Aggregating Devices) and the need to collect more information on the exact location of handline activities,
3) I-fish (the database developed by IMACS, which will be utilized to store and analyze the collected data from the region) official launch, which is to be held in Jakarta in March 2013
4) IMACS distributed 6 GPS Spot trackers, a VMS (vessel monitoring system) device that should enable fishermen to know their exact position and to be tracked via the Internet.

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