By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 19

The rigs work the same Benguela waters that feed the country. The boom's quiet test is whether oil and fish can share one sea.

The deep water where Namibia’s rigs are drilling is not empty sea. It is the southern reach of the Benguela Current, one of the most productive fishing grounds on earth and the source of an industry that feeds the country and earns its foreign exchange. The oil boom now filling those waters shares them with hake, horse mackerel and the fleets that catch them.

That overlap makes the boom a food-systems question as much as an energy one. Fishing is one of Namibia’s largest employers and export earners, and it depends on an ecosystem that seismic surveys, drilling and eventual production all touch. The issue is not whether oil arrives, but whether it arrives without eroding the food economy already working the same ocean.

Two economies in one current

The Benguela upwelling makes Namibian waters unusually rich, supporting a fishing sector that contributes a significant share of national output and employs tens of thousands directly and indirectly, much of it processed through Walvis Bay. It is a renewable resource that, managed well, pays every year without depletion.

Oil is the opposite kind of asset: larger in headline value, but finite and extractive, drawn from beneath the same seabed. Namibia now has to hold both in the same waters, which is less a choice between them than a problem of coexistence between a permanent food source and a temporary windfall.

One ocean now carries a renewable food economy and a finite oil one at the same time.

Where the two industries rub

The friction is concrete. Seismic surveying uses intense sound to map the rock below, and marine scientists have long raised concern about its effect on fish behaviour and on the whales and dolphins that navigate by sound. Drilling and, later, production add the risks of routine discharge and, in the worst case, a spill in a current that carries water and life across national borders.

The custodianship of that shared system is not Namibia’s alone. The Benguela Current Convention, which ties Namibia to Angola and South Africa, exists precisely because the ecosystem does not stop at a maritime boundary, and an oil incident in one country’s waters would move into another’s fishing grounds.

The sea mixes the risk; a spill or a disturbance does not respect the licence lines drawn on it.

Feeding the boom it grows beside

There is a supply side to the story as well. The onshore boom brings thousands of workers to the coast who have to be fed, and a strong local food and fishing economy is what keeps that demand from being met entirely by imports. The same Walvis Bay that lands the country’s catch can supply the canteens and camps the oil industry needs.

That is the constructive reading of coexistence. Handled deliberately, the boom is a new customer for Namibian food and processing rather than only a threat to the waters that produce it, keeping more of the spending on local plates and in local supply chains.

A growing coastal workforce is a market for Namibian food, not just a pressure on Namibian water.

The sustainability bet

The long test is whether the two uses are governed together. Careful zoning of drilling away from the most sensitive grounds, honest environmental monitoring and enforceable spill response are what let a fishery and an oilfield share a current. Left unmanaged, the extractive industry can quietly degrade the renewable one it sits above.

For anyone in food systems, fisheries or agribusiness, that is the decision the boom forces. Namibia can treat its ocean as a single asset to be balanced, protecting the food economy while it earns from oil, or it can privilege the windfall and risk the harvest that was feeding the country long before the first well was drilled.

The sustainable outcome is a sea managed as one system, not two industries pretending to be alone in it.

For a fishing company, a food processor or a policymaker, Namibia’s oil boom is a stewardship question posed in salt water: can a finite oil industry share the Benguela with the renewable fishery that feeds and employs the coast. The decision is whether to govern the two together from the start – zoning, monitoring and spill readiness in place before production – or to chase the barrels and hope the fish, and the food economy built on them, survive the company.

Sources: Reuters; Benguela Current Convention; Fishing sector overview (Economic Association of Namibia)