Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Sakti Wahyu Trenggono inaugurated a cold storage facility for fish with a capacity of 300 tons in Indramayu, West Java, on Friday, and said he expected fishers to use it optimally.
“(This cold storage) is small but I hope it can give benefits,” he remarked while launching the cold storage facility.
The small-sized facility is expected to benefit fishers around the Karangsong Fish Trade Place (TPI), he said.
The facility was symbolically handed over to the Indramayu district government, and will be managed by the Mina Sumitra Fisheries Cooperative.
“We handed over the cold storage to the Indramayu district government to be managed properly,” Trenggono remarked.
If the cold storage facility is not managed properly, it will quickly get damaged, he said. It is hoped that would not happen, he added.
“If it is not maintained properly, it will get damaged quickly, and that is what needs to be avoided,” he said.
Meanwhile, House of Representatives member Ono Surono said that the ideal cold storage capacity is one thousand tons, but due to budget constraints, the size of the Indramayu facility was reduced.
“If there was no COVID-19, a one thousand-ton (cold storage) could have been built, but this time, it is only 300 tons,” he explained.
A cold storage room is a room that is specially designed to maintain a certain temperature. The facility in Indramayu will perform the main function of maintaining the quality of fish caught by fishers by allowing them to freeze and store the fish, according to the ministry’s website.
A cold storage facility usually has an air blast freezer, whose temperature is set between -35 to -40 degrees Celsius, and a cold storage freezer that can store frozen products at temperatures between -18 and -25 degrees Celsius.
Meanwhile, the area of Indramayu sea waters, which reaches around 70 thousand hectares (ha), has huge potential for fish catch.
Source: Antara News