Presentation long abstract

Food systems scholarship has largely overlooked blue foods, rendering marine political ecologies and coastal fishing community dispossession invisible. This paper examines small pelagic fisheries governance in South Africa, where fish have been channelled through industrial pathways since apartheid—anchovy to fishmeal, sardine to canning—whilst marginalised coastal communities face food insecurity and progressive exclusion.

Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis of fisheries policy documents (1998-2025), we reveal how Administrative and Economic Rationalism and Sustainable Development rhetoric interlock to constitute blue colonialism. This regime naturalises industrial capture whilst legitimising dispossession by framing capital requirements as technical necessities rather than political choices. Post-apartheid "transformation" discourse enables elite accumulation: Black ownership statistics mask continued race and class-based dispossession of poor Black coastal communities. Scientific management monopolises knowledge authority, marginalising traditional ecological knowledge, whilst "sustainable utilisation" rhetoric depoliticises allocation decisions serving capital over food security.

The case exposes intersections of racial capitalism (where Black ownership masks continued race and class-based dispossession), epistemic colonialism (where only science counts as legitimate knowledge), and extractivist metabolism (where fish flow through industrial pathways that extract economic value and control from coastal communities).

This regime forecloses alternative rationalities, yet they persist in fisher knowledge, place-based practices, and community food systems, offering pathways toward transformation centring both human wellbeing and more-than-human ecological relations. This research centres marginalised marine political ecologies, reveals how "progressive" discourse conceals colonial dispossession, and articulates how alternative knowledge systems offer possibilities for food futures honouring justice and ecological integrity.