Essam Yassin Mohammed is the director general of WorldFish, a leading international research organization working to transform aquatic food systems to reduce hunger, malnutrition, and poverty.
As leaders gather in Mombasa, Kenya, for the Our Ocean Conference, we are again invited to admire the ocean: its beauty, its vastness, its mystery. We speak of blue horizons, coral reefs, whales, waves, and wonder.
All of that is true, but it is not enough.
The ocean is not simply a place we visit, photograph, or romanticize in speeches. It is part of the machinery of life on Earth. It shapes the air we breathe, the climate we depend on, the food we eat, and the livelihoods of millions of families whose names rarely appear in global declarations.
For too long, the ocean has been treated as either a victim or a resource. When we see it only as a victim, we focus on what must be saved. When we see it only as a resource, we focus on what can be extracted. Both views are incomplete.
The ocean is a relationship. It gives, absorbs, regulates, feeds, employs, and connects. Like all relationships, it cannot survive neglect, abuse, or one-sided expectations.
The future of food will not be written only in fields, forests, and farms on land. It will also be written in ponds, rivers, deltas, coastlines and seas, shaped by the small-scale fisher in Kenya, the fish farmer in Timor-Leste, the hatchery owner in Bangladesh, the woman processing fish in Nigeria, the seaweed farmer in the Pacific, and the young entrepreneur trying to build a dignified life in the blue economy.
Yet, aquatic foods remain strangely invisible in global conversations about food security.
We talk about hunger but not enough about fish. We talk about nutrition but not enough about the small fish, shellfish, and aquatic plants that carry essential micronutrients into the diets of millions. We talk about climate-smart agriculture but not enough about climate-resilient aquatic food systems. We talk about jobs for young people, especially across Africa and Asia, but not enough about the ocean and inland waters as sources of enterprise, dignity, and opportunity.
This invisibility has consequences.
When small-scale fisheries are ignored, coastal communities are left out of decisions that determine their survival. When aquaculture is ignored, countries miss opportunities to produce healthy food in ways that can reduce pressure on land and natural ecosystems when managed responsibly. When aquatic ecosystems are ignored, climate adaptation weakens because mangroves, wetlands, reefs, and coastal systems are not scenery. They are infrastructure.
The Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa matters because it is the first to be held on African soil. It also matters because Africa’s ocean story is too often told through the language of crisis: overfishing, illegal fishing, coastal erosion, pollution, vulnerability, and loss.
These challenges are real, but they are not the whole story.
Africa is also a continent of ocean leadership, coastal knowledge, youthful enterprise, food system innovation, and blue economy potential. From the Western Indian Ocean to West Africa, from small-scale fisheries to aquaculture, from mangrove restoration to digital monitoring, the continent has much to teach the world about what it means to live with the ocean, not merely extract from it.
The commitments made in Mombasa on marine protection, biodiversity, finance, and the blue economy will be important, but protection alone is not transformation.
Conservation cannot succeed if it treats coastal communities as problems to be managed rather than partners to be trusted. A fisher who has inherited knowledge across generations is not an obstacle to ocean protection. A woman who dries, smokes, trades or processes fish is not peripheral to the blue economy. A young person building a living from aquaculture is not separate from climate adaptation.
These are the people through whom ocean solutions become real.
The future we need is not a choice between ocean protection and human development. It is a new settlement between the two.
That settlement requires several breaks with old thinking.
First, we must stop treating aquatic foods as a footnote in food policy. In much of the world, fish is not a luxury. It is one of the most accessible sources of animal-source food and essential micronutrients. It is also culture, income, and identity. A food security strategy that ignores fish is not fit for the world we live in.
Second, we must stop confusing ocean protection with ocean exclusion. Marine protection matters. Biodiversity matters, but conservation that pushes coastal communities to the margins will not endure. The people who fish, farm, process and trade aquatic foods must be treated not as pressure on the ocean, but as partners in its recovery.
Third, we must stop allowing innovation to get stranded before it reaches people. Excellent science matters. Publications, pilots and promising technologies are essential. But in development, they are not the final destination. Science fulfills its purpose when better genetics, fish health systems, digital tools, improved feeds, and post-harvest innovations change what happens in hatcheries, farms, landing sites, markets, and households.
Fourth, we must stop building the blue economy from the top down. Ports, shipping, offshore energy, and finance all matter. But, if the blue economy does not create dignity, income, and opportunity for women, young people, and coastal communities, it risks becoming just another extractive economy painted blue.
Fifth, we must stop funding ocean ambition with leftover money. The ocean is central to food security, climate resilience, biodiversity and livelihoods, yet ocean action is still too often financed as an environmental afterthought. If we want aquatic foods, coastal resilience, small-scale fisheries, responsible aquaculture, and blue economy enterprises to scale, they need serious investment: public finance, concessional capital, private sector participation, philanthropy, and locally rooted financial mechanisms.
The point is not simply to fund more projects. It is to build pathways that allow good ideas to travel, from regional platforms that help countries produce more of their own aquatic foods to venture approaches that can move proven innovations from research into responsible scale.
Promises made at global conferences must be matched by budgets, instruments, and delivery models. Otherwise, the ocean will remain overpraised and underfunded.
This is the deeper meaning of reimagining the ocean.
It is not only about drawing new lines on maps or making new pledges at conferences. It is about admitting that the boundaries we created between land and sea, food and nature, climate and livelihoods, and science and delivery are no longer fit for purpose.
If we are serious about ending hunger, we must be serious about aquatic foods. If we are serious about climate resilience, we must be serious about the people on its frontlines. If we are serious about equity, we must recognize the women and men whose labor feeds millions but remains undervalued. And, if we are serious about the ocean, we must stop treating it as background.
The ocean is not a postcard. It is a pantry, a workplace, a climate shield, a memory, a culture, a home, and a promise.
Promises must be kept.
