The Coastal Town Standing Between Dredgers and the Benguela

The Benguela current makes Namibia's coast one of the most productive fishing grounds in the world, supporting a hake and pilchard industry that directly employs more than 13,000 people offshore and 8,800 onshore and earns hundreds of millions in exports. Marine phosphate mining would dredge the seabed beneath it, resuspending sediment and, opponents argue, releasing heavy metals into a food chain that ends on export plates. Swakopmund Matters, an environmental lobby group formed in the coastal town in 2011, has spent well over a decade putting that case publicly — that Namibia's marine environment cannot host both a viable fishery and large-scale seabed dredging. It works alongside the fishing sector, whose associations have gone to Namibia's High Court seeking to nullify the mining permit on the grounds that no proper environmental impact assessment preceded it, keeping what would be the world's first marine phosphate mine unbuilt.