In Raja Ampat, pearl farming balances business and ecological sustainability

RAJA AMPAT, Indonesia — Tucked in the curve of a bay in Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago, a floating structure appears like the tip of an iceberg. Below the surface, it’s teeming with oysters bearing pearls.

Marina de Olivera Kaesnube, 27, is about to start her workday on a January morning. Her office is the floating cage that holds thousands of Pinctada maxima pearl oysters. She has one job to do, but it’s arguably the most important: injecting a bead, known as the nucleus, into each oyster’s tissue. It’s around this nucleus that the oyster will secrete layer after layer of nacre, eventually yielding a highly prized pearl.

“Besides earning a living, I decided to join because I was interested in learning about pearl oyster farming, especially in this surgery process,” Marina tells Mongabay.

The marine ecosystem of the Raja Ampat Islands in the Indonesian province of West Papua forms a global biodiversity hotspot, with much of its waters still healthy. This tiny archipelago is a natural habitat for pearl oysters in Southeast Asia, where pearling has a long history. In the nearby Sulu and Celebes Seas and Aru Islands, harvesting of pearls from oysters in the wild is the main form of the pearling industry.

Throughout centuries of pearling, there was little thought given to the long-term sustainability of grabbing oysters from the seafloor, shucking them open to get the pearl, and killing them in the process. It was commonly believed that depleted oyster populations would replenish quickly from untouched stocks in deeper water, but that didn’t happen. What did, though, was that harvesters saw a decline in the quality of pearls. But when companies in Japan developed and perfected their pearl breeding and culturing methods, the industry turned right back around.

The first commercial pearl farm in Indonesia opened in 1982 in West Nusa Tenggara province, after the government allowed foreign investment (in this case from the Japanese) into the industry. The first harvest of cultured pearls was led in 1985 by then-president Soeharto.

PT Arta Samudra, the company that owns the floating cages off Batanta Island in Raja Ampat where Marina works, can trace its provenance back to those pioneering years, says Joy Marthyn Sitompul, a pearl technician who has worked for the company and at the site since 2003. It also used to be fully owned by Japanese investors, but now it’s almost entirely locally owned.

Today, Indonesia is one of the world’s top producers of cultured pearls. Pearl farms are peppered throughout the country, with multiple companies operating in a given site. In Raja Ampat, there have only ever been four companies operating at the same time, Joy says; today, there are three.

Joy studied fisheries at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), just outside Jakarta — more than 2,700 kilometers (1,700 miles) and two time zones away from Raja Ampat. He says he learned much about pearl oysters and their relationship to a healthy marine ecosystem, as well as about the pearl industry’s economic importance.

“As a pearl technician, I’m very well aware of the importance of a healthy environment and the impacts of degraded ecosystems,” he says.

Pearl farming in a changing climate

On this January day at the pearl farm, a batch of 30 young oysters is about to be injected with a nucleus. The injection toolkit and technique is intricate and delicate lest the oyster dies, and also is extremely secretive; we’re asked not to record any details of it out of concern that a competitor might copy it. Marina has worked here since 2022 and has mastered the art of implanting the beads: she can do each one in a minute.

As beautiful as they are, pearls are essentially an excretion — the result of an oyster’s defense mechanism in response to irritants. In nature, these could be grains of sand, food particles or a parasite entering the shell. The oyster secretes a mix of calcium carbonate and protein, known as nacre, or mother-of-pearl, coating the intruder in successive layers of this iridescent material.

The natural process can take up to 15 years to yield a decent-sized pearl, says Thoufiq Teguh, another technician at PT Arta Samudra who is also a fisheries graduate from IPB and joined the company less than a year ago. By implanting a calcium carbonate bead from the shell, the process can be speeded up to two years, he says.

PT Arta Samudra has a breeding facility in North Sulawesi province, about 700 km (mi) west of Raja Ampat, that grows the oysters for its farm. That means that unlike many other producers of cultured pearls, it doesn’t harvest oysters from the wild to stock its farm, Thoufiq says.

While the implant process is technically tricky, the most challenging part is ensuring that the oysters survive. Thoufiq says the average survival rate of implanted oysters is 80%.

“Basically the pearls are still created naturally by the oysters themselves. We only inject a foreign object inside them and the rest is nature and God doing their part,” Joy says.

He adds that any change in the marine ecosystem of a pearl farm will affect the oysters and subsequently the production. Warmer temperatures, for instance, create an increase in food and spur the oysters into greater activity, resulting in faster pearl production. The trade-off is that the pearls produced tend to be or irregular size and shape, making it harder to find a match for making a jewelry set. Colder temperatures, meanwhile, slow the oysters’ metabolism, allowing for a more uniform and gradual layering of each coat of nacre, and thus a more rounded and conventionally “beautiful” pearl — at the cost of a longer wait time.

More drastic changes in the marine ecosystem can affect the amount of maintenance needed and performed by the pearl technicians. “If the environment is damaged, we will need to do more effort and treatment just to keep the oysters healthy, and on top of that to keep the pearls healthy, and that will become such a high cost,” Joy says.

“But if the water is pristine, just as the natural climate, then it’s much easier to manage the farm because basically they don’t need much treatment. After the injection, they just need to be kept clean so that barnacles won’t get stuck on their gills closing them off,” he adds.

Marine pollution and sedimentation are other threats to the sustainability of pearl farming, Joy says. The thriving coral reefs and rich mangroves of Raja Ampat, serving as natural filters against these substances, make this archipelago the perfect site for growing pearl oysters.

“Our kind of aquaculture is different to other industries as it doesn’t exploit nature. In fact, it preserves it,” Joy says. “And pearl companies mostly don’t produce waste, actually, and they can exist side by side with nature well.”

Sustaining Indonesia’s pearl industry

When the pearls are ready for harvest, the oysters will typically open up, Thoufiq says. Each oyster at this farm is only subjected to a single cycle of pearl production; the technicians have found that pearl quality and size declines markedly with successive cycles.

“And we aim for premium-quality pearls,” Thoufiq says. Once they’ve done their jobs, the oysters are consumed for their meat and shells, or sold to other companies making lower-grade nacreous accessories.

Pearls are mostly sold through auctions, hence the absence of a standard market price, according to Joy. “They’re almost like fine arts, so it depends on people’s preferences and trends. When demand is high, then the price increases,” he says.

Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of South Sea pearls (the kind made by P. maxima oysters), accounting for 43% of global supply, according to government data. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes all of the country’s commercial pearl production is hatchery-based, from farms like PT Arta Samudra’s.

In 2016, Indonesia earned $15.2 million from exporting South Sea pearls, mostly to Japan. But the industry’s fast growth has taken a toll on wild oyster populations, which many producers still harvest to stock their farms. There’s also been a decline in the quality of pearls.

P. maxima isn’t a protected species under Indonesian conservation laws, and there’s no quota in place to protect them from being unsustainably harvested from the wild. The only formal protection in place is an export ban — more to protect the Indonesian pearling industry than to protect the species.

The islands of Raja Ampat are dotted across a patch of the western Pacific that’s larger than Switzerland. They form part of the Pacific Coral Triangle, a global epicenter of marine biodiversity that covers parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands.

Destructive fishing practices using explosives or cyanide were common in the waters of Raja Ampat from the 1980s, in response to rising commercial seafood demand. By 2006, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing accounted for 20% of the total reef fish catch. These practices have also been blamed by local fishers for causing declines in fish catch and posing the greatest threat to fish stocks.

Joy says there needs to be more effort to protect the pearl industry and the marine ecosystem on which it depends. Thoufiq says that in the specific case of Raja Ampat, he hopes all groups and communities will maintain their commitment to preserving the region against damage from illegal and destructive fishing practices, marine pollution and coastal development.

“I hope that cultivated pearls from Raja Ampat will gain more fame and demand not only from the Indonesian market but also globally,” Marina says.

Basten Gokkon is a senior staff writer for Indonesia at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @bgokkon.

Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: Take a journey through Raja Ampat, the most biodiverse marine region in the world, listen here:

See related from this reporter:

A pearl oyster farm in Bali aims to be a sustainable source of the jewel

Citations:

Varkey, D. A., Ainsworth, C. H., Pitcher, T. J., Goram, Y., & Sumaila, R. (2010). Illegal, unreported and unregulated fisheries catch in Raja Ampat Regency, Eastern Indonesia. Marine Policy, 34(2), 228-236. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2009.06.009

Larsen, S. N., Leisher, C., Mangubhai, S., Muljadi, A., & Tapilatu, R. F. (2018). Fisher perceptions of threats and fisheries decline in the heart of the coral triangle. Indo Pacific Journal of Ocean Life, 2(2), 41-46. doi:10.13057/oceanlife/o020201

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