We investigate in this article the Pontryagin's maximum principle for control problem associated with the primitive equations (PEs) of the ocean with periodic inputs. We also derive a second-order sufficient condition for optimality. This work is closely related to Wang (SIAM J. Control Optim. 41(2):583-606, 2002) and He (Acta Math. Sci. Ser. B Engl. Ed. 26(4):729-734, 2006), in which the authors proved similar results for the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes (NS) systems.