Beyond the Deep-Blue Turn: Connective Infrastructure and the Political Economy of Blue Food Access in Pacific Island Countries

Pacific Island Countries govern some of the world's most productive tuna fisheries, yet aggregate marine wealth does not guarantee equitable access to nutritious aquatic foods. This Perspective develops a framework for understanding that supply-access disconnect. We define connective infrastructure as the physical, digital, and organizational service systems that preserve, move, coordinate, and verify the circulation of aquatic foods between harvest and consumption. It develops a conceptual argument from published research and selected evidence relevant to different components of the framework: Kiribati's fiscal record, Tonga's 2022 compound infrastructure breakdown, and regional tuna statistics. Connective infrastructure mediates the conversion of marine resources into food access, with effects that depend on design, maintenance, and distribution. A political-economy perspective identifies how control over rights, finance, standards, expertise, and maintenance responsibilities shapes system design and effective access. Food policy should therefore pair production and conservation goals with maintainable logistics, proportionate information systems, and explicit distributional safeguards.