This tattooed Indonesian fisheries minister will blow your mind (and maybe your boat)

Susi Pudjiastuti shows off a copy of an application for a permit submitted one year before she was named Indonesia’s fisheries minister in 2014. Made out to an Indonesian company with an address in Fuzhou, China, it sought permission to operate a vessel capable of hauling in 3,000 tons of fish per voyage. The vessel would have operated a purse seine, a type of circular net used in commercial fishing to target dense schools of fish. The nets are controversial because they are so efficient – some vessels run out several kilometres of netting that drops from the surface to 650 metres deep, entrapping hundreds of tons of fish at a time.

Not on her watch, says the woman known by everyone here as Ibu Susi. “Can you imagine? This will vacuum your fish,” she says.

As China’s fishermen fan out farther amid collapsing fish stocks, Susi is standing firm. She has limited the size of domestic fishing vessels and entirely sealed off Indonesia’s nearly 6 million square kilometres of ocean territory from foreign fishing vessels. In a stark warning to poachers she has detonated and sunk foreign fishing boats in front of news cameras. So far, 363 boats, operating in the country illegally, have been scrubbed of their parts, nets and fuel and sent to the bottom of the sea. The hardline approach has earned her death threats as fishing industries in neighbouring countries have lost out on billions of dollars in lost catches of species.

Still, Susi says she doesn’t discriminate. She resents all foreign fishing boats equally. “I am not anti-China. If it’s any other country I will do the same thing. I wouldn’t be successful doing this combat if I discriminated.”

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As proof of her results Susi rattles off numbers that for months have formed the backbone of a PowerPoint presentation she has trotted out to journalists, conservationists and government counterparts.