By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 01

The water an oil province wants to drill is the same water that already feeds and employs the coast.

Behind the attention on an oil discovery lies a quieter tension about the sea itself. The waters off Namibia’s coast are among the most productive fishing grounds on earth, and fishing is one of the country’s largest export earners as well as a source of food and work. Jonker-1X, confirmed offshore in March 2023, places a new industry in that same ocean, and NAMCOR’s discovery announcement raises a stewardship question alongside an economic one.

The Benguela upwelling that makes Namibian fishing so rich is a living system, not empty water. An oil province and a fishery now have to share it, and how they share it is a food-systems and sustainability question before it is a petroleum one.

A fishery worth protecting

Namibia’s marine fisheries are among the most valuable in Africa, landing roughly 550,000 tonnes a year worth on the order of N$10 billion (about US$550 million) and ranking as one of the country’s leading export sectors after mining. Those fish feed people and pay wages, and they depend on the cold, nutrient-rich Benguela current that runs along the same coast the oil sits under.

That value is why the fishery cannot be treated as a bystander to an oil boom. It is an established food and export industry with its own workforce and its own claim on the sea, and any new use of that water is measured against what the fishery already provides.

The sea off Namibia already earns its keep, and the fishery holds the older claim.

Where oil and fishing can collide

Deep-water drilling and a coastal fishery interact in specific, physical ways. Exploration involves seismic surveys and drilling activity, vessels and exclusion zones, and the standing question of a spill in a current-driven ecosystem. Most of the time the two coexist, but the points of contact are real and have to be managed rather than assumed away.

The Benguela’s productivity is also its vulnerability. A system that concentrates life through upwelling would concentrate the effects of a serious pollution event too, which is why the caution around offshore oil here is not reflexive opposition but a rational reading of how the ecosystem works.

A rich current spreads its bounty widely, and it would spread harm the same way.

Two industries, one regulator's balance

The deeper issue is that ocean space in Namibia has often been allocated one use at a time, with fishing rights, exploration licences and conservation areas decided with little regard for one another. An oil province makes that fragmentation costly, because two large industries now depend on the same water and cannot each be managed as if the other were not there.

Managing them together is the sustainability task. It means weighing the value of a barrel against the value of a catch, timing and bounding drilling to protect key fishing seasons and grounds, and treating the marine ecosystem as a shared asset rather than a series of separate concessions.

The sea can carry oil and fishing together only if it is managed as one system.

The food-security stake

For a food-systems view, the fishery is not merely an export line but part of how Namibia feeds itself and employs its coast. Trading long-term fishery health for shorter-term oil revenue would be a poor bargain if it weakened a renewable food source that, well managed, produces indefinitely. Oil is finite; a healthy fishery is not.

The measured position is that the two need not be mutually exclusive, but coexistence has to be designed rather than hoped for. The discovery raises the stakes on marine planning that Namibia has not fully done, and the cost of neglecting it rises with every new well.

A barrel is spent once; a well-kept fishery pays every year.

For anyone in fisheries, food policy or conservation, Jonker-1X is a signal that Namibia’s sea is about to carry two major industries at once. The decision it forces is whether the country builds the marine planning to let oil and the Benguela fishery share the water, so that a finite resource is not developed at the expense of a renewable one that feeds and employs the coast.

Sources: NAMCOR; Benguela Current Convention; Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources