Conference of the Ocean People 2025 Reclaiming our Oceans; Reimagining our future

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DAY 1 – 8th June 2025

Conference Schedule

Second Conference of the Ocean Peoples (C-OP2)

Defying colonial capitalism:
Union for the future of Earth & Oceans

Our Oceans; Our Sovereignty; Our Future

Organised by the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP)

A Fisher People’s summit opposing the corporate-led UN Oceans Conference (UNOC3)

We, the Ocean Peoples, represented by the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), will come together at the Second Conference of the Ocean Peoples (C-OP2) “Defying colonial capitalism; Union for the future of Earth & Oceans” to denounce the dispossession of our marine commons and assert our customary rights over the oceans. As a global fisher movement, we represent 50 countries and more than 10 million fisher peoples, encompassing diverse groups of fishermen and fisherwomen, women and men seafood collectors and gatherers of marine, coastal and inland water spaces. The oceans are integral to our identities, ways of life, and lively ecologies. Our fisheries play a vital role in its contribution to coastal economies, diets, health and cultures. Fish serves as an accessible protein source and key nutritional component for over a billion people, with more than 500 million peoples whose lives and livelihoods directly rely on fisheries, contributing to the capture, processing, and marketing of fish, particularly women who account for nearly three-fourths of the workforce. We reiterate, as many times before, that “we are the oceans, we are the waters, and we are the peoples!”.

Following theDeclaration and Political Resolutions from our 8th WFFP Global Assembly (GA8) held in Brasilia (November 2024), we reject the corporate capture of the UN Ocean Conference (UNOC3, see our Statement). We refuse to engage in a global marine governance forum that is violating the democratic principles of the United Nations (UN) charter, including: the protection and promotion of our human rights and fundamental freedoms, central to our dignity and quest for equality; violating our rights to participate in decision-making; and failing to offer mechanisms towards accountability and transparency to oversee decision-making processes, and hold nation states accountable to their commitments. We have been invited to this and the previous two UNOC conferences but have rejected to participate due to our exclusion from agenda-setting and the denial of our freedom to raise our own issues and concerns. Our participation would legitimise this exclusionary form of governance, which is used by the organisers to tick the participation box to “ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels” as spelled out in SDG 16, without any intention for meaningful engagement or addressing the power imbalances at play.

The main outcomes of the UNOC includes a non-binding conference statement and a torrent of voluntary commitments that are disingenuously presented as the outcome of consensus, lacking any mechanism to ensure transparency in decision-making processes and accountability to monitor implementation. Instead, public-private partnerships and false solutions, including the financialisation of conservation via 30×30 and debt-swaps, blue transformation, Marine Spatial Planning, BBNJ, among many other market-driven approaches and agreements, are being promoted and positioned as crucial to accelerate investments and action supposedly to ‘save’ the oceans (see our GA8 Political Resolutions for specific positions on these false solutions). UNOC3 reinforces a false imaginary that everyone involved in such partnerships is equally responsible and able to express and act on their dissent and objections. The lack of attention to historical power relations and political economy at the core of the oceans predicament is staggering. How can the UNOC3 ‘save’ the oceans if it fails to address the main drivers of social and environmental injustice, and establish mechanisms to safeguard the effective participation of impacted right holders? We experienced this very same trend at the FAO SSF Summit, and demand that small-scale fisheries (SSF) are brought back into the COFI agenda.

Among the growing list of powerful corporate actors within these undemocratic spaces, is the non-profit industrial complex (including big environmental organisations and philanthropic foundations) with budgets higher than the fisheries and environment government departments in our countries, who are directly shaping the political agenda within UNOC3 and in our own countries. Within and beyond the UNOC3, our oceans are being negotiated behind closed doors to serve corporate economic interests (for example, the UNOC3 Blue Economy and Finance Forum – BEFF and the WTO negotiations and agreement on fisheries subsidies). This form of state capture is directly influencing the passing of development plans and policy reforms across national, regional and global levels that dilute social, labour and environmental laws. Simultaneously, advancing fortress conservation and punitive frameworks that criminalise our traditional ways of life (including IUU policies), being instrumental to the dispossession of our ocean peoples and the destruction of our marine commons.

For instance, in our GA8 WFFP Political Resolutions we reject the top-down fortress conservation promoted by the 30×30 agenda on Marine Protected Areas and conservation. The real driver of ecological destruction from the mountains to rivers to oceans is the capitalist model of economic expansion and extraction, not our livelihood practices. Fortress conservation is a form of eco-fascism with deep ties to colonialism and apartheid, based around violently separating our peoples from nature and forcing the loss of our identities. We denounce conservation initiatives that subject our ocean peoples to harassment and violence from park rangers, as well as militarisation on land, coasts, waters and oceans. We call for the full, effective and democratic participation of ocean peoples in the development and implementation of any conservation initiatives impacting our traditional customary rights and maritorios-territories.

The UNOC3 political agenda is about acceleration (see UNOC3 zero-daft), which is no other than the speeding up of corporate control and imperial quest to expand the global ocean economy, facilitating the commodification of our oceans, either for exploitation or conservation. In the name of development and conservation, corporations, including transnational environmental organisations, financiers, and governments all over the world are accelerating forms of ocean grabbing and fuelling climatic catastrophes, expropriating fisher peoples and other coastal communities, undermining our traditional historical customary and human rights. This is happening while the rise of imperialism, authoritarianism and fascism is accelerating the militarisation, criminalisation and violence against us.

In this violent context, we are also witnessing how so-called support organisations are infiltrating our organisations, advancing strategies of co-option of our leaders and grassroots language, relying on tactics of divide and conquer. Their aim is to legitimise undemocratic decisions, diluting our resistance under the pretext that we can make the “blue economy” better, while also obscuring their own for-profit political agenda. Blue economy, blue transformation, blue foods, blue carbon, blue deal, blue bonds, blue ports, blue energy and infrastructure, blue transition, blue partnerships, blue justice, blue anything is just a “blue washing” of this colonial, patriarchal and capitalist violence, as new frontiers for economic growth and corporate accumulation expand filled with empty promises to accelerate the plundering of our oceans and dispossession of our peoples as expendable communities.

Armed conflicts, warfare, and climate-related catastrophes threaten our human rights, intensifying hunger and impoverishment in our ocean peoples, causing devastating losses of life and economic security. These crises disproportionately impact women, young people, Indigenous communities, and other marginalised groups based on race, caste or social status. Our peoples, including our women, elders, youth and children are at the frontlines, being harassed, threatened, incarcerated, and killed. We firmly denounce the weaponization of hunger, food scarcity, and markets in warfare and geopolitical claims. We express our solidarity with Palestinian fishers and all Palestinian people, calling for respect of their right to self-determination and an immediate halt to the ongoing violence. We also stand with the Indigenous Peoples in Panama, who are being subjected to escalating military violence and repression. Ocean peoples worldwide face hardship from various internal disputes, including those connected to anti-narcotics campaigns and regional tensions in areas like the West Philippine Sea, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Myanmar, and Sahel nations. We urge all countries to uphold international law standards and human rights principles as the cornerstone for establishing peace between nations and peoples.

Building on our 2022 C-OP and our boycott of the first UNOC in 2017, we are organising this C-OP2 as a counter-event to UNOC3 to demand a halt to ocean grabbing, reiterating our commitment to the implementation of the SSF guidelines and our fight for the food sovereignty of ocean peoples as a critical solution. We continue to affirm and declare our commitment to the 5Rs that defined as our core principles in our 2022 C-OP Declaration. In asserting our sovereignty and customary rights we:

• Reject corporate-led false solutions, 30×30, and mega Blue Economy proposals. We remind the world that the earth has been brought to its current disastrous state by corporations and their capitalist colonial greed;
• Resist the blue paradigms, demanding a global moratorium of Blue Economy policies and projects that are driving the extermination of our peoples;
• Demand recognition of Ocean Peoples as historical and traditional customary right holders over the oceans;
• Demand restitution of ocean governance to our communities, calling for the redistribution of our marine resources and maritorios-territories, and for reparations for the harm to our oceans and communities;
• Reimagine our future within the oceans, waters and coasts, healing, dreaming, and creating worlds of possibility for our oceans and life on Earth.

To advance this political agenda, we are committed to working with those democratically structured UN bodies where we are recognised as human rights holders, with established mechanisms to participate in decision making process, including the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the Committee on Fisheries (COFI), as well as the Human Rights Council, and the Human Rights Treaty Bodies. We are mobilising using different strategies, including the historical and massive mobilisations of the Ocean, Water and Fisher Peoples’ Tribunals across the Indian Ocean (in Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh), Brazil, and South Africa; the Fisher Women Assemblies in India and soon to be held in Thailand; our emerging global campaigns against industrial aquaculture and 30×30, among countless actions and resistance strategies.

We express our commitment to the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum, which will take place in Sri Lanka, September 2025, working with small-scale/ artisanal/ traditional food producers, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, food chain workers, urban, rural and migrant labourers, feminist and climate justice movements to mobilise systemic transformation and advocate for social and solidarity economies. We extend this call for solidarity to build synergy with other global movements resisting corporate capture, colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal violences.

We set the agenda and show the solutions!

Our C-OP2 will be structured in two thematic days:

Day 1 – 8th of June: 

• Celebrating Ocean Day, honouring ocean peoples’ ways of life and cultures.
• Assault on Ocean Peoples: the dangerous trajectory of UNOC and the Blue regimes.

Sub-themes and key words:

• The trap of the Blue Economy, Blue Carbon, Blue Bonds, Blue Foods, Blue Transformation and Blue Growth.
• ⁠Displacement of capture fisheries through intensive industrial Aquaculture.
• Ocean/Water Grabbing.
• Attack on inland fisheries and fisher peoples.
• ⁠Climate games and injustices.
• 30×30, Marine Spatial Planning, debt-swaps and other conservation-led false solutions.
• Marine Mineral extractive frontiers (marine Geo-Engineering and sea-bed mining, coastal sand mining, etc.).
• Capital intensive coastal and marine tourism projects.
• Port-led infrastructure.
• ⁠Offshore projects and the expansion of the ocean economy (BBNJ, deep-sea mining).
• ⁠Criminalisation and militarisation of oceans.
• Public-private partnerships: co-option and exlusion.
• WTO fishery subsidies negotiations and consequences.

Day 2 – 9th of June

• Waters Rise: Reimagination; Recognition; Redistribution; Reclamation & Reparations.

Sub-themes and key words:

• Maritorial Rights: Coastal and Marine (Maritorial) legal and customary territorial rights.
• Going beyond ‘small-scale’.
• Assertions of territorial, traditional, and sustainable rights of fishing communities and Ocean, Waters and Fisher peoples.
• Identity as Ocean, Waters and Fisher Peoples.
• ⁠Ocean, Water and Fisher Peoples Tribunals.
• Right to fish in our territories and marine commons.
• ⁠Right to democratic opposition against disastrous policies of rentier states and corporations.
• ⁠Fisher Women rights as integral to traditional and historic rights.
• Right to land, ecology and safeguarding of earth and oceans.
• ⁠Food sovereingty.

Second Conference of the Ocean Peoples (C-OP2) 2025

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C-OP2 – The Second Conference of the Ocean Peoples
8–9 June 2025 | 🕒 3PM CET / 10h Brasília / 6:30PM Sri Lanka
Online political summit led by fisher peoples & allies from 50+ countries
Defying Colonial Capitalism: Union for the Future of Earth & Oceans
We reject UNOC3’s false solutions—blue carbon, 30×30, blue bonds—and fight for food sovereignty, maritorial rights, and ocean justice.

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