Abstract

Coastal megacities—Lagos, Jakarta, Mumbai, Manila—depend on small-scale fisheries (SSF) and intertwined informal blue-food markets to supply affordable wild fish to tens of millions, yet these flows remain largely invisible to official statistics and urban planning. This review synthesizes evidence on their contributions to urban food security—availability, access, affordability, stability, and safe utilization—alongside livelihoods and gendered post-harvest labor, while documenting mounting pressures from pollution, land reclamation, overfishing, and climate extremes. For the agricultural statistics community, we propose a pragmatic agenda to make these coastal food economies count: (i) city-scale blue-food satellite accounts that integrate nearshore catches, artisanal processing, and street-level retail into Supply–Use Tables; (ii) routine, gender-disaggregated market microdata (prices, volumes, perishability losses) from mobile vendor and wet-market surveys; (iii) empirical fish-flow mapping that links landing sites to low-income neighborhoods using vendor diaries and rapid lot-trace methods; (iv) coupled indicators that track catch and effort alongside water quality, habitat loss, heat stress, and flood risk; and (v) rights-aware metrics on access, tenure security, and displacement for waterfront communities. Embedding these measures in national accounts and urban dashboards would reveal how coastal fishing economies stabilize city diets during shocks, identify bottlenecks (cold chains, clean water, landing sites), and guide investments for just blue transitions. As seas warm and cities expand, counting wild foods—and the people who move them from shore to street—is urgent to safeguard urban food sovereignty and steer blue economies toward resilience, equity, and environmental integrity.