The Ocean Question

Felix Mallin

Across the planet, from the smallest fishing village to the deepest reaches of the high seas, ocean space is being reconfigured. As the limits of production and accumulation are pushed outward under the auspices of blue economy schemes, energy transition prerogatives, climate-smart food systems and ever-more-ambitious conservation targets, a whole new host of socio-ecological faultlines are pressing into view. Toxic algal blooms, plastic-choked gyres, the spectre of deepsea mining, and a scramble for strategic reefs and islands converge with rising seas and sinking coastlines to form a volatile frontier of environmental and geopolitical friction.

Yet in debates on agrarian transitions and the restructuring of rural worlds, the global ocean remains a curiously amorphous feature. Where the ‘land question’ has long anchored (if not absorbed) discussions of wealth concentration, dispossession, and peasant struggles, a parallel ‘ocean question’ – though never fully absent – is typically treated as a mere corollary. The question then is: what consequences follow from this relegation to a matter of supplementary concern for critiques of the global political economy of contemporary capitalism? And what implications might this have for how we understand the struggles unfolding along and beyond populated global coastlines where nearly 11% of the global population, or 896 million people, live?

If scholarship on agrarian change has taught us anything, it is that ecological transformation is always embedded within power relations that are themselves mediated through historically specific configurations of land, labour, and capital. Yet while the empirical origins of this field lie, as its name suggests, in agrarian and peasant struggles rather than in maritime or fishery conflicts, the contemporary analytical impulse often extends its reach to coastal zones and offshore industries with little differentiation. In other words, the analytical contribution of an inquiry into, say, Chilean offshore salmon farms is treated as commensurate with that of Indonesian palm oil plantations in building the theoretically abstracted picture of ‘agrarian change’. In this sense, is it mere hair-splitting that the sea has never been added to Adam Smith’s enduring trinity formula of land, labour, and capital? We could, of course, simply assume it is now implicitly included when we mount our critiques of the political-economic relations this formula conceals. Or must we take its omission more seriously?

Land versus Ocean Grabbing: Out of sight, out of mind?

As a vantage point for this ‘conceptual mediation’, we might first turn to debates surrounding the presumed twins of land and ocean grabbing. Over the past decade, ‘ocean grabbing’ has left its mark in the lexicon of critical discourse on the oceans. A much-noted report published in 2012 by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food had breathed fresh life into the notion. A series of ensuing publications, most prominently by the Transnational Institute (TNI), propelled it into global use. Like land grabbing for the green economy, ocean grabbing came to figure as the dark side of the global blue economy frenzy.

However, we should acknowledge that ocean grabbing only became a thing in critical vocabulary after scholarship on land grabbing had already filled entire library shelves. At first glance, this delayed entrance onto the stage might be justifiable in terms of proportional relevance of land vis-à-vis ocean space for the global economy and the satisfaction of human needs. For instance, if we consider global nutritional supplies, studies estimated the aquatic (i.e. fresh and sea water) contribution to global animal protein production at less than a fifth of the total production by 2022.[1] In other domains, such as the extreme centralisation in farmland ownership, the pre-eminence of the land question is even more palpable. The crux of the matter, however, lies not so much in present-day statistics but in the conceptual habits that entrench premature conclusions about the relative significance of land ‘versus’ sea in shaping economic futures. If we are to confront these blind spots, there are at least three reasons why we should put the ‘ocean question’ side by side with the ‘land question’:

Firstly, figures on nutritional output, labour intensity, or private ownership of land are snapshots of a rapidly shifting configuration. They reflect the sedimented inequalities of past enclosures, not the dynamism of current trajectories. As oceanic frontiers become increasingly legible to capital through new technologies, legal regimes, and investment vehicles, the large-scale colonisation of marine space is no longer speculative but actively underway. To appreciate the emerging reality of this trajectory, one does not even need to invoke the sea-steading pipe dreams of libertarian utopians. Rather, it is visible in the accelerating flows of finance into offshore energy generation, mariculture, seabed mining, autonomous submarine war fare, marine biotechnology, and ocean data infrastructures.

Secondly, the geophysical nature of ocean space has always, and continues to, require distinct constellations of labour, machinery, infrastructure, and finance to render it operable for capital. Unlike terrestrial production systems, the ocean economy functions through specialised instruments of risk management (e.g. marine insurance markets, shipping bonds, flagging systems) that are integral to both extraction and circulation. These formations have historically engendered uniquely seaborne compositions of capital and labour. Fixed capital deployment, for instance, is bifurcated between hypermobile assets like super tankers and underwater drones, and highly immobile infrastructure, such as wind parks and ports. This spatial differentiation produces unique turnover rhythms and investment cycles. The ratio of fixed to circulating capital in maritime sectors tends to be skewed toward long-term, high-maintenance installations with slow amortisation periods. Labour at sea, by contrast, is radically mobile, profoundly internationalised, and structurally disorganised. Maritime labour regimes depend on flags of convenience and fragmented jurisdictions. Filipino seafarers might crew Japanese-owned, Vanuatu-flagged vessels operating in the North Pacific this month and the South Atlantic the next. As Campling and Colas have shown, this is not a bug in the system but a central feature of the ‘oceanic condition’ of capitalism, one in which capital enjoys flexibility while labour is uprooted, atomised and hyper-exploited.

This leads us to a third and compounding reason: the ecological and legal abstraction of ocean space renders it less visible as a site of extraction and exploitation. Fishers do not squat, dig, or plough; they drift, cast, and haul. The sea bears little witness, leaves no furrow (aside from megatons of abandoned fishing gear), and offers few stable referents for territorial claims. This invisibility shields both capital and its enclosures from scrutiny. The Filipino crew of the aforementioned trawler may traverse hemispheres within a matter of weeks, but their capacity to organise or protest, compared to a Colombian trucker or a tractor-equipped Indian farmer, is miniscule. This long-cultivated invisibility has also made the criminalisation of small-scale fishers both easier to legitimise and harder to contest. Satizábal and colleagues aptly paint this as a global ‘theatre of enforcement’ against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing that is not so much about halting ecological destruction than it is about disciplining both precarious and self-sufficient fisher communities through surveillance, sanctions, and sometimes outright militarisation. Once again, an armed conservation patrol at sea will hardly elicit the same juridical scrutiny as one conducted in metropolitan proximity. Meanwhile, industrial fleets operating through layered shells of corporate ownership, offshore registration, and legal obfuscation are well-positioned to continue with impunity.

The class politics of blue economy struggles

In order to understand how these distinctive traits of capital at sea play out for our conceptions of land versus ocean grabbing, let us first identify their commonalities. Both terms seek to capture a transformation in the relationships between capital, labour, sovereignty and subsistence, through various mechanisms of enclosure, appropriation and dispossession. Undoubtedly, ocean grabs echo and intertwine with land grabs as regards to the abstract underlying social processes: capital’s search for new spatial fixes and tangible assets, the uneven concentration of wealth and power, geopolitical and imperialist politics, spatial competition between different sectors, and so on. But the critical question is whether these commonalities in form lead to identical outcomes in political and geographical terms. Does the ‘ocean question’ neatly fold into the ‘land question’?

The answer is necessarily twofold. While we must resist drawing a hard analytical line between the two domains or be led astray by vague calls to ‘theorise from the sea’, the modalities of oceanic enclosure and appropriation are historically and geographically distinct. Ignoring these distinctions invites misleading analogies. The study of ocean grabbing under capitalism reveals a long and uneven history of expansionism and exclusion, yet one that both temporally and spatially features patterns of enclosure that are often more abrupt and comprehensive than those seen on land. Arguably, the transformation of the global ocean since 1945, culminating in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), represents the most sweeping reorganisation of any planetary space in history. This unparalleled shift – from the contested abstraction of the ocean as the last great commons and the ‘freedom of the seas’ to a rigid grid of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) – rendered ocean space uniquely governable for capital; that too, in a fraction of the time it took for agricultural or pastoral lands to be enclosed.

UNCLOS was not the end of ocean grabbing, as many negotiators and observers on the left had once hoped, but instead became its institutional sanctification, ensuring capital’s ubiquitous access to maritime rent, providing security for long-term fixed capital investments, and the formalisation of exclusion. While originally rooted in Third Wordlist developmentalist visions of equity and postcolonial assertions of sovereignty, the grand UNCLOSian enclosure clearly came to privilege capital-intensive actors able to broker deals directly with the state, while treating subsistence and customary systems as mere anachronisms. It has also brought to the fore a space where capital and empire intersect quite brazenly. The emerging logic of pelagic imperialism means that maritime sovereignty becomes an expression of geostrategic ambition. Distant water fleets or deep-sea research vessels increasingly represent not only means of extraction and observation, but geopolitical instruments for controlling large spatial corridors.

In the blue economy era of the present, these dynamics have become more, not less, overt. To draw on Bernstein’s formulation on the tenets of political economy, the class project of the blue economy reconfigures the most basic relations: who can work, who can fish, who can invest, and who can be expelled. Much of this happens behind a veneer of socio-ecological virtues: under the banner of conservation, in the language of inclusion and sustainability, and behind the guarded doors of increasingly private sector-run ocean summits. Even the most celebrated marine conservation efforts in ABNJ are now embedded in what Havice and colleagues paraphrase as a ‘conservation-extraction nexus’ in which marine protected areas are not obstacles to extraction but tools to legitimise it. This nexus functions like an offsetting scheme, in which cordoning off one symbolic grid cell for conservation serves to justify extraction in another; turning protection into a strategic trade-off rather than a genuine constraint on extraction.

Outlook: There is a Land Question and an Ocean Question

Raising the ‘ocean question’ is then not an act of disciplinary expansion for its own sake. But if agrarian scholarship is to engage meaningfully with these dynamics, it must move beyond the language of supplementarity. The ocean is not an add-on to the land question; it is a domain with its distinct political logics of power, historically evolved class configurations, inherent economic contradictions, and own modes of resistance. Expanding our understanding of geo-historical differentiations in enclosure or commodification processes does not fragment the critique, but helps to sharpen it. Importantly, in doing so, we should resist the tendency to collapse diverse struggles into moral binaries. All too easily, recent critiques of ocean grabbing and calls for ‘blue justice’ tend to reproduce overly romantic notions of a unified ‘fisher people’ or ‘coastal communities’ being collectively dispossessed and sitting by definition at the losing end of the enclosure squeeze. Class differentiation, as Barbesgaard cautions, is as central in fishing as in farming villages. There are capitalist boat owners, surplus-producing petty capitalists and precarious labourers, sometimes in the same household. Responses to enclosure are shaped not only by external forces but by the fractures of class, caste, race, loyalties and generation within communities. As in rural worlds, resistance is real but uneven; strategies of survival differ. Not all fishers are anti-capitalist, some are investors.

Felix Mallin, along with Liam Campling and Mads Barbesgaard, is guest editor of the recent Journal of Agrarian Change Symposium on Ocean Grabbing.

This is part of a series of specially curated blog posts in which authors are invited to reflect on the theme of ‘Agrarian Questions’, highlighting different, even novel, ways of interpreting and engaging with the core questions of agrarian political economy in different historical and contemporary contexts. The posts will be released over the coming months as part of the 25th year celebrations of the Journal of Agrarian Change. You can find the full series of blog posts here.

[1] Aquatic refers to sea- and freshwater sources. Even mariculture arguably constitutes a hybrid of land and ocean-based industries, given its strong reliance on terrestrial raw materials, medication and machinery.