“We are the Oceans, We are the Waters, We are the Peoples” : WFFP Declaration Against Ocean Grabbing and False Blue Solutions

“We are the Oceans, We are the Waters, We are the Peoples”
We, the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), representing over 10 million fishers across 50 countries, affirm that fisher peoples are custodians of the world’s waters, inherent rights-holders committed to food sovereignty, biodiversity, and living in harmony with nature. However, the imperialistic nations’ relentless accumulation of wealth is not only exploiting and expropriating the historical, traditional and indigenous customary homelands of fisher peoples and coastal communities, but is simultaneously annihilating our sovereign rights over our lands, waters and fisheries, ethnically cleansing and violently uprooting our ways of life, our socio-ecological identities and our cultural belonging from the coast, ocean, rivers, inland waters, mangroves, islands, seas and all our traditional territories.
Ocean and land grabbing including fisheries has accelerated through extractive industries (mining, oil and gas); destructive industrial fishing; mega infrastructure projects (waterways, industrial wind farms, pipelines, smart cities, reclamation, and port construction); financialised conservation schemes like 30×30 and OECMs; marketisation and privatisation of nature; and corporate industrial aquaculture (fish factories or blue foods). Narratives such as ‘blue growth’, ‘blue economy’, and ‘blue transformation’ promise sustainability but accelerate grabbing and amount to greenwashing. These initiatives are embedded into national economies through blue finance programmes, binding nations to fiscal conditionalities that subordinate sovereignty to transnational capital, reducing even democratically elected states to “rentier states” leasing oceans for corporate profit. This drives the climate crisis and the criminalisation of and violence against fisher peoples. We resist the commodification of our oceans, fisheries, and coasts and its members will advocate at all levels to denounce false solutions and resist the grabbing of our territories under fraudulent “green” or “blue” claims.
The WTO, IMF, World Bank, and free-trade agreements have been used to dismantle national policies that protected peoples’ sovereignty over natural resources and local markets. WFFP firmly oppose and denounce those who persistently push this agenda, including large international environmental organisations, the World Bank, regional development banks, and corporations We reject these activities, falsely labelled as “development”, and call for genuine community-led, rights-based development shaped by fisher peoples. We remain committed to engaging in legitimate multilateral policy platforms on food, fisheries, agriculture, climate, biodiversity, and human rights to advocate for our political autonomy and customary governance. We recognise the FAO, COFI, CFS, and UNHRC as the appropriate UN bodies for global governance in which we actively participate.

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