By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14
The same cold water Galp is drilling feeds one of Namibia's oldest industries. The find sets a new use on top of an old one.
The Orange Basin that holds Mopane also holds fish. The same cold, productive waters that Galp is drilling for oil feed one of Namibia’s oldest industries, and the discovery announced on 21 April 2024, which Reuters ranked among the basin’s largest, quietly sets a new industry down on top of an established one.
That overlap is the food-systems question inside the oil story. Fishing is a mainstay of Namibian export earnings, employment and protein, built on hake and horse mackerel, and it depends on a marine environment that heavy offshore activity can disturb. Mopane forces a country to weigh barrels against catch in the same stretch of sea.
Two economies in one current
Hake and horse mackerel account for more than 90 per cent of Namibia’s catch, with hake the most valuable and its chilled and frozen product a leading source of foreign exchange. That fishery sits in the Benguela current off the same southern coast where the Orange Basin licences run, so oil and fish are not neighbours in theory but occupants of one water column.
The point is not that drilling ends fishing. It is that two large marine economies now share a space managed, until recently, for one, and the rules that kept the fishery sustainable were not written with drillships in mind.
Oil and hake occupy the same water, under rules designed for only one of them.
A fishery already under strain
Namibia’s marine record shows how fragile these stocks are. A commercial pilchard moratorium imposed in 2018 followed the collapse of a sardine fishery that once ran to millions of tonnes a year, a reminder that a mismanaged marine resource does not simply recover. A sector with that history has little tolerance for new pressure on its waters.
This is why the coexistence question is a food-security question. Fish is not only export revenue but domestic protein and coastal employment, and a shock to the stock is felt on the plate and in the town before it shows in the trade figures.
A coast that has already lost one fishery cannot treat the next shock as hypothetical.
The blue-economy frame
Namibia talks about its ocean as a blue economy – fishing, aquaculture, ports and now energy drawn from the same sea. The framing is useful because it insists the uses be planned together rather than one at a time, but it can also hide hard trade-offs behind a tidy phrase. An oil spill, seismic disturbance or shipping surge does not respect a policy diagram.
Managed well, oil revenue could even fund the science and enforcement that a stressed fishery needs. Managed badly, the newer, richer industry simply pushes the older one out of the water and the budget.
A blue economy only works if the loud new use pays to protect the quiet old one.
Feeding the land while pumping the sea
The sustainability test for Mopane is whether Namibia can add offshore oil without subtracting from the food its sea already provides. That means marine spatial planning that keeps drilling and fishing grounds apart where it can, spill-response capacity sized to a producing basin, and a fisheries science budget that does not shrink as oil attention grows.
None of that is automatic. The default in resource booms is that the loudest industry captures the regulator, and fisheries managers will have to argue for a seat that oil did not previously contest.
The measure is a full net and a flowing well – not one bought with the other.
For anyone in fisheries, food policy or coastal development, Mopane is a reminder that Namibia’s oil sits on top of its fish. The decision the discovery forces is whether the country plans the two marine economies together, protecting a food source that predates the oil by generations, or lets the newer, louder industry set the terms for a sea that was feeding the country long before it was drilling it.
Sources: Reuters; Blue economy and fishing (Namibia Trade Network); The Namibian Marine Fisheries Sector (IJSRP)
