By Dr. Shahzad Ali Gill
World Maritime Day fell this year under a theme the International Maritime Organization set to run through 2027: From Policy to Practice, Powering Maritime Excellence. Few sectors illustrate that gap better than Pakistan’s ocean economy. The country’s seafood exports hit a record US$568 million this year, up 38% in two years, according to the Ministry of Maritime Affairs. Frozen fish alone earned more than US$105 million, shipped to Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the United States. That looks like a success story. It might also be the last easy year before the bill comes due, because no one in government can say with confidence how much fish is left to catch.
Pakistan’s last national marine stock assessment was completed in 2015. It found 60 to 90 percent of stocks already overexploited. Export targets have climbed steadily since then, from roughly US$2 billion in earlier estimates to a stated US$10 billion goal in the 2025 fisheries policy, without a single fresh survey to check whether the sea can support that ambition. A peer-reviewed 2025 legal review of the country’s fisheries framework reached the same conclusion from a different angle, describing that no law currently sets a Total Allowable Catch or Maximum Sustainable Yield limit for anything caught in Pakistani waters. Right now, Pakistan is building an export industry on a resource nobody has counted in over a decade.
This is not a case of Pakistan lacking ambition. The Pakistan Maritime Zones Act 2023 fixed the country’s legal boundaries: a 240,000 square kilometre Exclusive Economic Zone plus an extended continental shelf, bringing the total closer to 290,000 square kilometres. The National Fisheries and Aquaculture Policy 2025-2035 set export and harmonisation targets. URAAN Pakistan priced a blue economy chapter at $4 billion of impact by 2030. Maritime@100 put a $100 billion figure on the whole sector by 2047. On paper, this is one of the more ambitious ocean strategies Pakistan has produced in any policy area in recent history.
Set that ambition beside what the ocean contributes today, and the gap becomes hard to ignore. Pakistan’s blue economy accounts for an estimated 0.4 to 1 percent of GDP. Indonesia, which built its own official blue economy roadmap, already measures 3.6% of GDP from the sector and has set a target of 12.5% by 2045. Seychelles counts 27.4%. In the Maldives, tourism and fisheries together generate close to half of national output. Even Norway, an oil and gas economy first, counts its ocean industries at 16 to 22 percent of GDP in an ordinary year. These are not wealthier countries with more coastline. Several of them are smaller than a single Pakistani province. What they have that Pakistan does not yet have is the institutional discipline to turn ocean policy into ocean revenue.
Where Pakistan has built that discipline, it shows. Mangrove cover in the Indus Delta has more than tripled since 1990, from roughly 47,700 hectares to 146,400 hectares measured in 2020, largely through sustained Sindh Forest Department restoration work. The Delta Blue Carbon project built on that recovery has already issued close to 4.8 million verified carbon credits through the Verra registry, real, tradable revenue against a measurable and growing natural asset. It proves that the model works. It also remains the exception rather than the rule across the rest of the sector.
The rule looks more like the Pakistan Maritime and Port Authority Act 2025, a bill meant to give the sector a single coordinating body instead of a dozen agencies pulling in different directions. The Ministry of Finance objected to it in March, citing a built-in conflict of interest between the regulator and operator roles the bill proposed, weakened autonomy for state-owned port authorities, and misalignment with Pakistan’s IMF commitments. The bill remains stalled. Every port authority, shipping line, and fisheries department still answers to a different part of government, and that fragmentation is precisely what stands between a policy on paper and a stock survey that gets funded, scheduled, and repeated.
Pakistan negotiates the rules for the ocean better than it applies its own. It chaired the G77 bloc through the hardest years of talks on the High Seas Treaty, formally the BBNJ Agreement, and signed it in July 2025. The treaty entered into force in January 2026 after reaching 60 ratifications and had passed 100 by late September. Pakistan has yet to complete its own ratification. A country that helped write the rules for protecting the ocean beyond national borders should not be slow to apply them at home.
None of this requires inventing new financial instruments. Seychelles restructured US$21.6 million of debt in 2016 in exchange for protecting 30 percent of its waters and hit that target four years early. Belize, Barbados, Gabon and Ecuador have since used the same model at a larger scale, Ecuador alone converting US$1.6 billion of debt to fund a marine reserve around the Galapagos. Pakistan issued its first sovereign green sukuk, worth Rs. 30 billion, in May 2025. The legal structure, the shariah board, and the stock exchange listing built for that instrument could support a blue sukuk faster than building anything from scratch. The financing exists. What is missing is the decision to point it at the ocean.
Go back to that record export figure. $568 million is real money, earned by real fishermen, on real boats, sold into real markets. It is also, on current evidence, a number that cannot be trusted to repeat itself, because the resource behind it has not been checked since 2015. Pakistan does not need another vision document or another billion-dollar target. It needs a stock survey commissioned this year, a port authority with the autonomy to act, and a signature on a treaty it helped write. The ocean will keep giving Pakistan record years for a while yet. Whether it continues depends on what gets done before the next World Maritime Day, when Pakistan will again be asked to move from policy to practice.