Like many nations Indonesia is pressing ahead with a marine spatial planning process intended to bring coherence to marine management. As a contribution to this, broad scale oceanographic surveys are being undertaken at considerable cost to the tax payer. While the desire to deepen understanding of the marine environment is admirable, the limited social and economic component of this process is regrettable. Ironically, these social–economic data are routinely collected and it is the process of integrating these data that is missing. As a step in the right direction, this paper outlines a simple methodology using social–economic statistics consistently collected by government agencies and applies it to one coastal province of Indonesia, West Sumatra. Two indices are developed to map fisheries dependence and incidences of poverty amongst fishers at three spatial scales. Using census data of employment and poverty across all economic sectors, incidences of poverty amongst fishers are placed in the wider poverty context in order to begin to answer the question of whether ‘fishery truly rhymes with poverty’ using empirical data. This study identified the following trends; 1) that the number of fishers in a state of poverty is increasing, 2) fishing together with crop farming are the two sectors in which incidences of poverty are greatest, 3) there is no significant correlation between high fishing dependency and high proportions of poverty amongst fishers, 4) there is a significant correlation between agricultural dependence and total percentage poverty in coastal communities and 5) there are inverse correlations between the strength of other economic sectors and poverty in the agricultural sector. Implications for poverty alleviation initiatives and policy recommendations are briefly discussed. The methodology described in this paper is instantly applicable to the ongoing implementation of the national marine spatial planning program.