After decades of overfishing combined with environmental changes, Namibia's sardine (pilchard) population finally collapsed. Falling by 99.5% from an estimated 11 million tonnes in the 1960s to a tiny 50,000 tonnes in 2015, this resource has been well and truly exhausted. Despite calls for a moratorium on sardine fishing by scientists since 1995, this was only implemented in 2018 for a period of three years. The Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFMR) is now contemplating reopening sardine fishing, but have the stocks recovered sufficiently? Sardines are small fish that feed on plankton and provide an important source of food for a large array of other fish, seabirds, marine mammals and humans. They are considered a "high quality" fish in terms of the energy they contain per gram. Sardines thus provide most of the energy pathway between plankton and larger fishes (including many commercial species), birds and marine mammals. For humans, canned pilchards are much cheaper than most other protein options. These fish are also used widely to produce fishmeal for agricultural purposes, which was once a thriving industry in Namibia. It is therefore no surprise that when the sardine stocks collapse the entire marine ecosystem becomes less productive and people suffer as a result. Given the dire economic straits Namibia finds itself in, it is understandably tempting to bring back the sardine fishing industry. Yet if the fish stocks have not yet recovered to the point where sustainable harvests are even possible, is this wise? At this point, even small harvests are likely to be unsustainable and possibly seal the fate of sardine fisheries once and for all. This would be the final deathblow for any kind of industry based on this resource and would further damage the critical marine ecosystem associated with the Benguela Current.