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Towards an agenda
for Arctic sustainable development |
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The Arctic Council (www.arctic-council.org)
was established in 1996 with a mandate to take cooperation on Arctic
affairs beyond the environment, with particular emphasis on sustainable
development. The Council is to provide a high level forum for the
Arctic states (Canada, the United States, Iceland, the Russian Federation,
Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway) to address environmental protection
(especially in areas of pollution), sustainable economic development,
subsistence activities, health, community development, tourism,
and transport and communications. Indigenous peoples organisations
were also ensured permanent participation. |
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The objectives of the Arctic Council's
working groups are to protect Arctic ecosystems (and here, humans
are considered part of the ecosystem); to ensure the sustainable
utilisation of renewable resources by local populations and indigenous
peoples; to recognise and to incorporate the traditional and cultural
needs, values and practises of indigenous peoples related to protection
of the Arctic environment; to review regularly the state of the
Arctic environment; to identify the causes and extent of pollution
in the Arctic; and to reduce and eliminate pollution. This takes
place through five programmes set up to deal with environmental
problems, such as oil pollution, the dumping of radioactive waste,
contamination of the environment by heavy metals, acidification
and Arctic haze. These programmes are: the Arctic Monitoring and
Assessment Programme (AMAP); Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment
(PAME); Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR);
Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF); and Sustainable Development
Working Group (SDWG). |
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The Arctic Council superseded the
Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) which was initiated
in Rovaniemi, Finland in June 1991 when environmental ministers
from the eight Arctic countries signed the Declaration on the Protection
of the Arctic Environment. Also referred to as the Rovaniemi process,
the AEPS was a forum for the eight Arctic states to share information
and to develop programmes and initiatives to deal with environmental
problems such as Arctic pollution. |
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The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC)
was formed in Alaska in 1977, in response to increased oil and gas
exploration and development, and represents the Inuit of Greenland,
Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Since 1983 the organisation has had
NGO status at the United Nations and also sees itself as being in
the vanguard of indigenous rights generally, especially with regard
to self-determination. The ICC criticised the AEPS for its initial
narrow focus on conservation and emphasised a need to go beyond
merely monitoring the state of the Arctic environment by including
discussion of how to provide and maintain a sustainable economic
base for Northern communities, which would move beyond the cycles
of boom and bust that characterises much large-scale economic development.
While the conservation of certain species such as whales and polar
bears is important for indigenous peoples, science-based resource
management systems often ignore indigenous perspectives and values.
The designation of wildlife refuges and national parks to safeguard
animals and the environment, for example, often restricts the rights
of people to hunt, trap and fish in those areas, while international
regulation has had an effect on subsistence whaling. The ICC position
is that protection of the environment is a prerequisite for the
sustainable development of Arctic resources. |
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The ICC has pushed the issue of sustainable
development because the small, remote, predominantly indigenous
communities of the circumpolar north are mostly characterised by
their precarious mixed economies, combining the informal sector
of customary and traditional subsistence activities, which provide
the primary sources of food for many households, with the formal
sector of wage-earning possibilities and transfer payments. The
informal sector is not always easy to measure or analyse, combining
as it does hunting, trapping and fishing based on long-term, consistent
patterns of use and seasonal variation, non-accumulation of capital,
sharing of wild foods, the generational transmission of knowledge,
and non-monetary exchange based on kinship groups and other networks
of close social association. Subsistence activities do not only
provide the nutritional means for survival, hunting and fishing
are important for cultural identity and embody notions of a specific
relationship between humans and animals essential for the continuity
of indigenous culture and livelihoods. Despite the cultural and
economic importance of subsistence hunting, increasingly fewer residents
of Arctic communities participate in or depend directly upon the
harvesting of terrestrial and marine mammals. Furthermore, even
if most wished to hunt or fish, subsistence activities cannot by
themselves provide the basis for long-term sustainability in all
Arctic regions. Instead, many Native people are involved in other
types of economic activities, such as commercial fishing, the oil
industry or mining. |
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Yet the informal and formal economies
are, in many cases, interdependent making the boundaries between
them blurred and not easily defined. Although a subsistence economy
is usually differentiated from a capitalist economy in that the
unit of production (in this case, the family) is also the unit of
consumption, the subsistence economies of the Arctic are nonetheless
dependent upon market forces and monetarisation. This has been the
reality since Native peoples became involved with the fur trade.
And as studies of commercial fisheries in remote Alaskan villages
have shown, while people fish in order to sell rather than consume
their catch, they nonetheless engage in activities which correspond
to the spatial, seasonal, cultural and social organisational aspects
of subsistence modes of production, such as resource diversification
and the interdependence of households. Similarly, in Labrador, the
techniques and knowledge required for a commercial caribou hunt
resemble aspects of harvesting caribou for subsistence purposes,
except that the hunters are employed by a commercial enterprise
and deliver the caribou to a processing plant. It is difficult to
see the difference between a hunter who brings caribou meat home
for his family, and the hunter who harvests the animal in exactly
the same way but sells the meat to a processing plant in order to
buy food for his family. |
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As the Labrador case illustrates,
although some of the produce from hunting, herding, trapping and
small-scale fishing may be consumed by the families of hunters,
herders, trappers and fishers, some of it is traded, exchanged,
or sold. While much of this happens in local and regional contexts,
meat, fish, furs, and skins also find their way to distant markets,
making informal economic activities dependent upon and closely interwoven
with the global economy. Hunters, trappers and fishers and their
families also depend on modern technology, such as outboard engines,
snowmobiles, gasoline, rifles, and nets, which means a steady flow
of cash is needed to support subsistence activities. Until the activities
of anti-sealing and anti-trapping organisations virtually wiped
out the markets for seal skins and furbearing animals such as beaver
and muskrat, the principal source of cash for hunting families came
from the sale of these commodities. In the north of Greenland, for
example, the fall in the price of sealskins and even the loss of
sealskin markets as a result of animal-rights activity in the 1980s
meant that people in settlements dependent on hunting had to look
elsewhere for a source of cash needed to supplement subsistence
hunting. A modest fishery for Greenland halibut developed to meet
this need. Yet, overfishing has already resulted in a depletion
of Greenland halibut stocks, as large-scale commercial fishing by
boats from other parts of Greenland combine with local fishing to
put pressure on the resource. |
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Generally, then, throughout the circumpolar
north hunting families are characterised by pluriactivity in that
cash is generated through full-time or part-time paid work, seasonal
labour, craftmaking, commercial fishing or other pursuits that support
or supplement subsistence activities. Although, ironically, full-time
work restricts the time available for hunting and fishing, the casual,
temporary or seasonal nature of many jobs does not allow for many
households to be self-sufficient and independent of the formal economy.
Subsistence activities may be something that individuals fall back
on to supplement the paid work they have, or while they are looking
for employment in the formal sector. |
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Some observers see informal economic
activities as having great potential in forming the basis for economic
diversification in indigenous communities, stressing the importance
of the informal sector for small-scale community development, and
arguing that subsistence activities provide the best basis for self-sufficiency,
in the sense that the local economy would be able to provide people
with a real and regular income. The expansion of informal economic
activities, such as the harvesting of terrestrial and marine mammal
products on a more commercial basis, has been seen by some as the
solution to reliance on non-renewable resource development. For
example, in Greenland the Home Rule Authorities consider the production,
distribution and exchange of food and products from hunting and
fishing as vital to the development of local, small-scale sustainable
community development. The promotion of this system by the Home
Rule government would reduce the need for imported foodstuffs, promote
local hunting practices and offset the need for government subsidies
to smaller settlements. As well as meeting demand from domestic
and regional markets, indigenous business ventures are also looking
to open up international markets. For example, Korean buyers regularly
fly to Alaska's Seward peninsula and pay at least $50 for a pound
of reindeer antler (which is then used as an aphrodisiac). In Labrador
Inuit hunters kill around 1,000 caribou annually in a commercial
hunt, while one Baffin Island community is meeting Japanese demand
for the skins of ringed and harp seals. |
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But because of the interdependence
between formal and informal economic sectors families and households
are faced with the problem of ensuring a regular cash-flow. Opportunities
for part-time work in small communities are limited and full-time
jobs are even more scarce. The fur trade, the gold rush, and oil,
gas and mining have all afforded employment opportunities to indigenous
peoples, as well as impacted on indigenous ways of life, yet markets
collapse, prices fall and jobs go. Recently, the growth of the tourism
industry throughout the Arctic has allowed indigenous communities
to capitalise on the desires of visitors to experience wilderness
and Native culture, but the appearance of tourists is seasonal making
it unlikely that tourism can form the basis for community development.
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Indigenous communities and indigenous
peoples' organisations are not against various forms of non-renewable
resource development. Indeed, they wish to participate in, and profit
from, development activities to ensure both economic and cultural
survival. In the past, major industrial development rarely paid
attention to the importance of the environment and its resources
for indigenous peoples, or to the social and economic problems that
often result from such development. The opportunities for dealing
with the problems of indigenous economies can only arise if indigenous
peoples have control over resource use and development, if the social
and economic diversity of indigenous communities is recognised and
maintained, and if indigenous skills and knowledge are enhanced.
Furthermore, there are calls to take into account indigenous environmental
knowledge in environmental impact assessment. |
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In some respects, land claims settlements
have allowed indigenous communities to make considerable progress,
and some of the more significant developments have been the result
of work by community cooperatives and Native-owned corporations.
The latter have either entered into joint ventures with oil, gas
and mining companies, or have developed initiatives of their own.
For example the Northwest Alaska Native Association (NANA), the
regional corporation for northwest Alaska, has supported and promoted
Cominco's Red Dog lead/zinc mine, while the Arctic Slope Regional
Corporation (ASRC) is the biggest Alaskan-owned corporation, successful
because of its relationship to the North Slope Borough (Alaska's
wealthiest regional government, partly because it taxes the oil
fields) and the North Slope oil industry. ASRC has also invested
heavily in business concerns elsewhere in the United States. |
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The Arctic Council ministers likewise
take the view that environmental protection and sustainable development
are not mutually exclusive. The working group on sustainable development
originated as a Task Force on Sustainable Development (TFSD) set
up following the Nuuk AEPS ministerial meeting mainly in response
to pressure from the ICC to broaden the AEPS agenda. TFSD was upgraded
to a working group at the Inuvik AEPS ministerial meeting. Its establishment
indicated that the future direction of the AEPS would be concerned
with broader isssues of sustainable development, rather than with
pollution and environmental damage. Initial emphasis on the harvesting
of renewable resources and tourism seems to suggest that the working
group was much more influenced by the input of indigenous peoples'
organisations, and in particular by the ICC submission at the Nuuk
meeting on how indigenous peoples could participate and how indigenous
knowledge could be integrated within the AEPS process. Sustainable
development is also a priority area for the Arctic Council, which
follows closely the 1987 Brundtland Commision definition as development
which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their needs. Canada, in its role as
first chair of the Council, defined sustainable development as 'development
which seeks human well-being through an equitable and democratic
utilisation of society's resources, while preserving cultural distinctiveness
and the natural environment for future generations'. While the challenge
facing the Arctic Council is to continue the environmental protection
work begun by the AEPS, it recognises that it must link it more
closely to sustainable development. Indeed, Oran Young has stressed
that sustainable development should be the overarching framework
for the Arctic Council as it sets out to chart new developments
in international Arctic cooperation. Among other things, Young has
recommended that subsistence preference, co-management, and the
development of environmentally-appropriate technologies and practices
should be some of the guiding principles for the Council's work
on sustainable development (see also www.svs.is/oran.htm).
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In seeking to reconcile the diverse
and contested perspectives of indigenous peoples, environmentalists,
scientists and ministers, Canada argues that 'the Council's mandate,
as well as its representative structures and processes..., can accommodate
the concerns of all parties, under the rubric of environmentally
sustainable human development (Graham ibid.: 51, emphasis in original).
Mary Simon, Canada's former Ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs,
was reported as saying that the Arctic Council must not make the
mistake of seeing environmental protection and sustainable development
as distinct, as the AEPS had done, but that sustainable development
must have strong environmental goals. While the Arctic Council's
view of sustainable development makes appropriate nods in the direction
of the ICC position on sustainability, as development that allows
social, cultural, spiritual and economic growth, controversy over
appropriate development strategies may come to dominate the initial
progress of the Council. |
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