By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 07

The oil frontier and the fishing grounds share the same cold, productive sea. Only one of them feeds people today.

Before Namibia had an oil economy in its southern waters it had a food economy there. The same Benguela current that cools the coast off Oranjemund feeds one of the most productive fisheries on the continent, and the Graff-1 well announced in February 2022 now sits in that same body of water.

That overlap is the sustainability question hiding inside the discovery. A proven petroleum system invites years of seismic work and drilling across a sea that already carries an established, employment-heavy fishing sector, and the two uses will have to share the current whether or not policy plans for it.

The sea already has an economy

Fishing is not a marginal activity for Namibia to weigh against oil; it is a pillar in its own right. The sector contributes on the order of 6.6 per cent of GDP, stands as the country’s second-largest export earner after mining, and directly employs somewhere around 18,000 people, with hake dominating the catch value. It is a food and jobs system built over decades.

The engine of that sector is the Benguela upwelling, whose cold, nutrient-rich water along a coastline of roughly 1,570 kilometres makes the fishing grounds so productive. The oil and the fish owe their presence to the same geography, which is why they cannot be planned in separate rooms.

Namibia’s southern sea is not empty space to drill – it is a working food economy.

Same water, different extraction

Graff-1 lies about 270 kilometres off Oranjemund, near where the Orange River meets the Atlantic, and the appraisal work it triggers will move through waters that trawlers and small-scale fishers also depend on. Two extractive economies now draw on one ecosystem, and seismic surveying and drilling raise real questions about fish behaviour, habitat and the risk of a spill in a shared current.

None of that argues against the discovery, but it does argue for treating the fishery as a stakeholder rather than a backdrop. A sea can carry oil work and fishing at once only if the terms of sharing it are set deliberately.

One current now feeds two extractive industries, and only careful rules keep both viable.

Stewardship as policy, not afterthought

The appraisal phase is exactly when the sustainability rules are cheapest to write and most likely to hold. Deciding survey windows, exclusion zones, monitoring and spill-response capacity before production locks in commitments while the activity is still small. A food-secure fishing nation has an interest in reconciling the two uses early, not after infrastructure and expectations harden.

The environmental case is not opposition to oil; it is insistence on sequence. Rules agreed while there is still only a discovery are far stronger than rules bargained once there is a production project to protect.

The moment to protect the fishery is during appraisal, before production sets the terms.

The livelihoods at the river mouth

The human stakes are concentrated where the Orange River meets the sea. Oranjemund and the coastal south hold communities whose food and income run through the fishery and the estuary long before any oil job existed. A durable oil policy has to account for these livelihoods rather than assume a new industry simply replaces an older one.

The sustainable goal is coexistence measured over decades – a fishery that stays productive while an oil sector grows beside it. That balance is a land-and-sea food-systems question, and the discovery is the moment it moves from theory to planning.

The test is whether the fishery is as healthy after the oil arrives as it was before.

For a fisheries operator, a coastal community leader or a policymaker, Graff-1 is a warning as much as an opportunity: Namibia’s new oil frontier sits inside the Benguela waters that already feed the country and earn its foreign exchange. The decision is whether to fix the rules for sharing that sea now, during appraisal, or leave the fishery to argue its case once a production project is already in the water.

Sources: NAMCOR Graff-1 press release; Namibia commercial fishing (US Country Commercial Guide); Management of shared hake stocks in the Benguela ecosystem (FAO)