What the Push for Blue Foods Signals About Food-System Blind Spots
- Cedric Habiyaremye
- Jan 20
- 4 min read
A recent World Economic Forum paper on investing in “blue foods”: aquatic foods such as fish, shellfish, and seaweed, is framed as a call to unlock underutilized nutrition, climate benefits, and livelihoods. That framing is reasonable. But the more revealing signal is not what the paper proposes. It is what it quietly exposes about how food systems have been valued and governed until now.
For much of the past century, global food strategy has been organized around land-based production. Policy, capital, and institutions evolved around crops, fields, and terrestrial inputs. Aquatic systems, by contrast, were treated as complementary rather than foundational; important for nutrition and livelihoods, but rarely central to food security, climate strategy, or long-term investment planning.
This was not because blue foods lacked value. It was because they sat awkwardly within dominant frameworks.
Aquatic food systems cut across jurisdictions, blur the line between wild and managed production, and tie ecological dynamics directly to livelihoods and trade. They do not align cleanly with conventional agricultural policy, standard investment risk models, or simplified climate accounting. As a result, they were often addressed through environmental or conservation lenses rather than economic and strategic ones.
The current push for blue foods reflects a growing recognition that these frameworks are no longer sufficient.
As land-based food systems face tightening constraints such as water scarcity, climate volatility, soil degradation, and rising demand, categories that were once considered peripheral begin to matter differently. Nutrition security, climate mitigation, and resilience can no longer be pursued solely through terrestrial systems. The gap is becoming visible not because blue foods are newly important, but because the rest of the system is under strain.
The WEF paper attempts to respond by translating aquatic systems into terms that capital and policy can recognize: investability, emissions reduction, and development impact. In effect, it is an effort to retrofit existing decision frameworks to accommodate systems they were not designed to include.
This pattern is not unique to blue foods. It appears wherever value exists outside dominant institutional logics; in soils, informal markets, smallholder systems, care economies, and ecological services more broadly. These elements tend to remain underprioritized, not because they are marginal, but because they are hard to classify, finance, and govern using inherited structures. Recognition often comes only after pressure elsewhere forces a reassessment.
This is not an exhaustive assessment, but a systems-level reading of how long-standing assumptions are beginning to strain under new constraints.
Seen this way, the renewed focus on blue foods is less a breakthrough than a correction. It signals a delayed adjustment to realities that have been present for some time but have been insufficiently priced, governed, or integrated. What is framed as innovation is, in many cases, overdue alignment.
The deeper implication is not about any single food category. It is about the limits of how food systems have been conceptualized; what was counted, what was financed, and what was treated as strategically relevant. When those assumptions begin to fail, attention shifts quickly, not because values have changed, but because constraints have become unavoidable.
Whether the investment flows and policy changes proposed in the paper materialize remains uncertain. What is clearer is that food-system thinking is being forced to widen, not by ideology, but by necessity. The challenge ahead is less about identifying new solutions than about updating the structures through which value, risk, and importance are assessed.
Blue foods happen to sit at that fault line. Others will follow.
A Note on Capital and Governance
At its core, the renewed attention to blue foods reflects a familiar failure mode in capital allocation and governance. Investment systems tend to follow established categories rather than underlying needs. Capital flows most easily where risks are standardized, jurisdictions are clear, and returns are legible even when those flows reinforce long-term fragility. Systems that fall outside these parameters are not judged unimportant; they are simply harder to price and therefore easier to ignore.
Governance structures mirror this logic. Ministries, regulatory bodies, and international frameworks are often organized around historical divisions—agriculture versus fisheries, environment versus economy, that no longer reflect how food systems function in practice. When responsibility is fragmented, accountability diffuses, and strategic neglect becomes the default outcome.
The result is not underinvestment by accident, but by structural design. A value that does not align with existing institutional boundaries struggles to translate into durable policy or sustained capital commitment. Only when pressure accumulates elsewhere do these blind spots surface as priorities.
Seen through this lens, blue foods are less an emerging opportunity than a diagnostic signal. They reveal how slow-moving capital and governance frameworks lag behind biophysical and nutritional realities, and how adjustments tend to occur reactively, once constraints force recognition rather than beforehand.
Context
This reflection draws on themes present in recent global food-systems literature, including synthesis work by international organizations on fisheries, aquaculture, food security, and agri-food investment, as well as the World Economic Forum’s 2026 paper on investing in blue foods.
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