This is an excerpt from a text originally published in the collection “Die Schweiz und die Ozeane” by the Swiss think tank Denknetz, Kai Kaschinski / Daniel Haller

Issues such as food security, the resource crisis, global trade, environmental protection, and migration can only be discussed comprehensively today if the situation in the oceans is taken into account. The oceans have long been more than just trade routes and fishing grounds. They are undergoing fundamental changes. They have become production sites and resource stores. Fish are not only caught, but also farmed and genetically modified. Almost half of the fish and seafood consumed today is produced in aquaculture. Modern container ships, their uniform boxes, and intelligent logistics make shipping routes an integral part of international production processes. Globalization would be unthinkable without container transport. In terms of weight, maritime transport accounts for around 90 percent of international goods.

Energy hunger at sea

Around one-third of the oil and gas available on the world market now comes from the sea – and this trend is on the rise. Over two million people work on thousands of offshore platforms, which dig their way down to the marine deposits off the coast with their production facilities. In addition to the oil platforms, there are numerous wind farms, which are shifting energy production to the sea on a considerable scale. Cables and pipelines criss-cross the seabed. Hundreds of billions are being spent on the construction of wind turbines in the North Sea and Baltic Sea alone. Anyone crossing these on a ship will notice that at night the red lights on the wind turbines stretch from horizon to horizon. What is welcome as an alternative to nuclear or coal-fired power plants becomes questionable when you consider that each individual wind turbine consumes ten tons of sacrificial anodes for corrosion protection during its operating life. The effects of metals dissolved in water on marine organisms are now beginning to be researched retrospectively. The idea of replacing the fossil fuel industry with another industry because of its problems could turn out to be an ecological miscalculation. Overconsumption on land also leads to higher transport and thus energy requirements at sea:

coastal areas are being divided into large checkerboard patterns to satisfy the hunger for energy. Along the west coast of Africa, countries have divided their economic zones into a myriad of individual claims. The fact that oil and gas production licenses are not always awarded to international corporations within the legal framework is demonstrated by the fact that the raw materials corporation Glencore from Baar (ZG) had to accept a billion-dollar fine for corruption. Bribery was an issue in Equatorial Guinea, among other places, where Glencore has a stake in an offshore gas field.

The coasts are the starting point for the industrialization process on the world's oceans. They represent the new frontier. This is where the advance into the sea begins. Oil production, with all its consequences, has already reached the deep sea. The tragic prime example of the associated environmental risks and social threat scenarios is the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent record oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The drilling rig belonged to Transocean, based in Steinhausen (ZG).

Ocean grabbing through deep-sea mining

But even the electrical industry, which is necessary for decarbonization, is planning to access the seabed. The next imminent step in the industrialization of the oceans is the expansion of the extraction of marine mineral resources. In line with developments in the oil sector, plans are underway to exploit deposits of manganese nodules, massive sulfides, and ore crusts in the deep sea.

It is now no longer a question of if, but only a question of when. The shipping company Allseas in Châtel-Saint-Denis (FR), which specializes in laying underwater pipelines, is developing the machinery to bring mineral nodules from thousands of meters below the sea surface to the surface. Glencore has a stake in Allseas' Canadian partner, The Metals Company. Although the Swiss Federal Council has spoken out in favor of a moratorium on deep-sea mining, it is less consistent than the French government, which is calling for a ban.

This is about catching up on industrialization, a qualitatively new development, a cultivation of the sea that will be initiated by deep-sea mining. The motivation behind this is to create a new economic area whose resources can be exploited and fed into production processes to generate growth. However, the approach to integrating the oceans into the globalized economy is more akin to neoliberal strategies than to the utopia of an unknown land whose discovery should benefit all people. The idea of the sea as the common property of mankind, its last heritage, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, is being questioned from many sides in this process. Instead, nationalization and privatization plans are being pursued.

In this respect, the dynamics unfolding at sea are primarily a reaction to the resource crisis on land and can be explained by the intensified global exploitation of nature. With the industrialization of the oceans, as with the green economy, the planetary boundaries for raw materials and the burden on ecosystems are to be shifted once again. Space is being created to repeat the old mistakes and avoid having to deal with their consequences. This fits in with the popular message that innovative green technology can curb the climate crisis – popular because it reinforces the fatal impression that we can continue as before. Yet climate scientists such as Johan Rockström are calling for “the most profound change the world has ever seen” to take place by 2030.

From dugout canoes to floating fish factories

As one of the oldest human uses of the seas, fishing was the first to be affected by industrialization. Trawlers locate schools of fish using state-of-the-art echo sounders and cast their nets at ever greater depths. Super trawlers can bring 600 tons of fish on board every day. Thousands of tons are processed and frozen directly on board during a single trip. While industrial fishing fleets account for about half of the world's catch, the other half is caught by small-scale fisheries, which include both motorized crab boats and dugout canoes. Given the overfishing of stocks, the effort required to fill the nets is constantly increasing.

Against this backdrop, global fisheries are characterized by competition between small-scale and industrial fishing. In 2012, when presenting his report “Fisheries and the Right to Food,” the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food compared the way in which the owners of large industrial vessels appropriate marine food resources to land grabbing and coined the term “ocean grabbing.” In 2024, he reiterated: “The sea is our mother and the rivers are her relatives. States and companies must stop exploiting oceans and rivers and treating them as a source of commodities, and instead recognize that oceans and rivers are a source of life.”

As a landlocked country, Switzerland does not have its own fishing fleet. Yet the refrigerated shelves in stores are full of seafood products. A video by the NGO The Outlaw Ocean Project shows the supply chain for squid: caught in part by illegal boats on which human rights do not apply, transferred at sea to legal ships, processed in China by Uyghur forced laborers, and then exported all over the world – including to Switzerland. In light of the forced labor in Chinese fish factories uncovered by Outlaw Ocean, it is clear that the consumption of seafood is not only associated with ecological problems, but also with major social and human rights issues. This is not least because sea transport is so cheap that exploiting global wage differences is always profitable. And Swiss companies are a major force in sea transport.

Focusing on the oceans

The industrialization of fishing threatens the livelihoods of many small-scale fishermen in the Global South, whose fishing grounds are being destroyed by fish factories. Climate change is heating up the oceans, reducing oxygen levels, acidifying the water, and thus threatening biodiversity. Deep-sea mining threatens to destroy habitats that have not even been explored yet. Alongside the continued operation of oil rigs, wind farms are transforming shallow seas such as the North Sea into industrial areas. All this in the name of profit, convenience, and overconsumption on land—many reasons to integrate marine issues into cultural, development, climate, human rights, supply chain, energy, economic, and environmental policy.