Long ago—this past October; so much has happened since then—I began researching a topic that scientists, academics, governments, and activists have spent a lot of time discussing over the past decade through webinars, peer-reviewed papers, and commissioned reports. With so much written about the topic, it seemed reasonable to search for a story idea.
 
The more I read, the more confused I became, which I figure is a bad sign, since understanding and synthesizing information for you is my job. The topic is the Blue Economy—also shortened to the rather existential BE—and it’s murky. BE concerns the ocean and the economy intersecting in different ways, but its meaning depends on who you ask and what they want. It’s a bit like fishing: the catch depends on bait, gear, and geography. BE could be tourism, fishing, aquaculture, renewable energy, or even seabed mining—I think.
 
The idea has been around for over a decade, but the United Nations published a concept paper on BE in 2014, so I started there. The Ocean’s Economy: Opportunities and Challenges for Small Island Developing States is pretty clear that these island nations—Seychelles, the Cook Islands, and others—embraced the idea as a way to protect and benefit from their vast ocean resources. These countries have significant fisheries resources, which could be better leveraged, and many have the right geography to fulfill the promise of newer industries, such as marine renewables or bioprospecting for medicines, cosmetics, and supplements.
 
The United Nations defines the Blue Economy as an economy “that simultaneously promotes economic growth, environmental sustainability, social inclusion and the strengthening of oceans ecosystems.” Essentially, the goal is to decouple socioeconomic development from environmental degradation.
 
So far, so good, but my Spidey-sense tells me—and many others—that the Blue Economy may just be a new concept masking an old one: enclosing public commons for private gain. Land-grabbing, after all, has deep global roots. Example: in 1583, an Englishman sailed into St. John’s, Newfoundland, and with the permission of Queen Elizabeth I claimed ownership of all the beaches. He then rented them back to the fishermen who had been using them for free to haul up and dry their fish on. So began a looting of the coastal commons; the first wave, perhaps, of land-grabbing. The second wave really took off in the early 2000s with corporations and countries buying productive land in foreign countries to grow desirable crops with someone else’s water—for example, sugar cane and palm oil in Tanzania and Cameroon. Communities are rarely, if ever, consulted. Even if the locals are considered, they lack bargaining power against big corporations.
 
Nathan Bennett studies the human dimensions of the ocean economy and consults for various national and international organizations; he also chairs the People and the Ocean Specialist Group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Bennett reckons we have entered a third wave, with a twist: ocean grabbing. An example would be European Union and Chinese industrial fishing fleets currently fishing off the African coast, to the detriment of small-scale African fishing communities. Here’s another, one that may seem on the surface a good thing, but which may ultimately dispossess local fishing communities: the establishment of new marine protected areas to enhance fisheries.
 
“To me, the Blue Economy–Blue Growth issue is the up-and-coming issue, and probably the one that defines what happens with the ocean in the coming decade,” Bennett says. “Climate change is the elephant in the room, but the projected growth of the Blue Economy, the language and the thinking around it—[that the ocean] is 70 percent of the planet and we can take advantage of it, [and that] the level of the economic benefits from the ocean will triple—is wild. We’re going to triple what we take from the ocean, and we think it’s already overburdened?”
 
It’s early stages yet but the concept has already caught on. The United Nations has declared the 2020s the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which will see more efforts to harness the ocean’s economic potential. Canada, Japan, and Kenya cohosted the first BE conference in November 2018. The program was heavy with the usual buzzwords: sustainability, equity, food security.
 
But lofty goals and high profit margins are not known to be good bedmates. Without immediate monetary rewards, the pro-sustainability intent of the Blue Economy could easily be ignored, says Doug Chiasson, who works on small-scale fishery issues for World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF). “Carbon storage, food security, subsistence harvesting—it’s tough to put a monetary analysis on that,” he says. “How does that figure in [to the Blue Economy]?”
 
Fitting small-scale fisheries into a fisheries economy that traditionally rewards scaling up is a case in point. Often a small-scale fisheries economy needs to factor in food security. Chiasson works with the community of Sanikiluaq in Nunavut, developing a scallop, sea urchin, and sea cucumber fishery in southeastern Hudson Bay. First steps are assessing species abundance, analyzing markets, and figuring out how to maintain food security, sustainability, and a commercial market.
 
Chiasson agrees with Bennett that how the public, governments, NGOs, and businesses perceive the Blue Economy in the coming decade will determine what happens.
 
“I would say we’re at the tipping point,” Chiasson says. He knows some definitions of the Blue Economy—the World Bank’s or International Monetary Fund’s, for instance—wouldn’t align with WWF’s definition. “But I think it’s a good sign that all these organizations are talking about it.” In 2019, the Canadian government announced its intent to talk about and nail down a BE strategy with help from provinces, territories, Indigenous communities, and organizations like WWF.

Ultimately, Bennett finds attempts to redefine the Blue Economy a distraction, with more energy being spent on debating the meaning and far less on embracing the spirit of the original definition. Some organizations are backing off using the term because it is already fraught, he says. “Oil development should not be part of the Blue Economy; aquaculture might be; but only if it’s done well. Renewable energy, reasonable, but again it must be sustainable.”
 
Bennett’s suggestion is to keep the original definition as it relates to the small island nations, and call other efforts simply the Ocean Economy.
 
We’ll keep our eye on the BE beat, which appears, so far, to be a quagmire of fresh ideas plopped on top of old problems: profit, ownership, clashing values, and the familiar battle between long- and short-term benefits. In other words, a familiar story.

Jude Isabella
Editor in chief