Download Hunger in the Arctic: With climate change, Inuit food supplies may

Hunger
in the Arctic
With climate change, Inuit food supplies may come up short.
Story and photography by Isabelle Groc
38
Planning February 2013
LAST summer,
James Simonee, a resident of Pond Inlet on Canada’s North Baffin Island,
went out seal hunting. He heard that
killer whales were in the area chasing
narwhal—also called narwhale—and
decided to investigate. He saw a large
group of narwhal very close to the
shore seeking refuge from the killer
whales in shallow waters. All Simonee
had to do was to wait on shore and
shoot. “The killer whales helped me get
the narwhal,” Simonee says.
In the eastern Canadian Arctic, climate
change and the resulting loss of sea ice during the summer have opened new hunting
territory for the killer whales, which can
now compete more easily for food that they
and the native people both favor. Simonee
catches about three narwhals a year, sells
the tusks, and shares the muktuk, the vitamin-rich outer layer of skin and blubber,
with family and friends.
Simonee got lucky this time, because
climate change most often works against Inuit hunters, who have increasing difficulty
bringing home species such as caribou or
Later and shorter ice freezes make getting
to Inuit hunting grounds harder and more
dangerous.
American Planning Association
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Narwhals (above), whales, fish, ringed seals, and caribou are all important food sources for Inuits, but harvesting them is becoming more difficult.
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Planning February 2013
nities are not necessarily in a
position to go out hunting and
exploiting other species at that
INUVIALUIT
time of the year if they do not
NUNAVUT
have the financial resources to
buy boats and gasoline. “Opportunities don’t translate into
Yukon
NUNATSIAVUT
Newfoundland actual harvesting,” Ford says.
Northwest
& Labrador
Terrorities
On the other hand, changNUNAVIK
ing environmental conditions
create unprecedented opporCanada
Quebec
tunities for industrial development projects—and they could
further impact the Inuit’s local
due to difficult wind conditions. He also food supply. One of the biggest resource
notes a significant delay in ice freeze-up in extraction projects ever proposed for the
the Iqaluit region of 1.7 days per year dur- eastern Arctic, the Mary River iron ore
ing the same period.
project, could have significant impacts on
Younger hunters are even more vulner- caribou habitat and migration movements
able as they don’t have the knowledge and as well as on marine species including bowskills to cope with dangerous ice conditions. head whale, narwhal, beluga, and walrus.
“They still hunt, but they hunt less,” James The open-pit mine, owned by Baffinland
Ford says.
Iron Mines Corporation, would be built
Conversely, the open water period has about 100 miles south of Pond Inlet, along
extended in the summer, but local commu- with a railway and port that would allow
A
US lask
A a
Inuit
communities
Map courtesy Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, www.itk.ca
ringed seals that are part of the traditional
Arctic diet, along with whales, fish, plants,
and birds. “Inuit live and breathe climate
change. There are significant impacts to the
ability of Inuit to get food and access the
animals,” says Terry Audla, president of the
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a group that represents Inuit (about 55,000 people) living
in 53 communities in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Northern Quebec, and
Northern Labrador. “It is becoming tougher
to navigate the ice,” Audla says.
With warmer temperatures, the sea ice
takes longer to form in the fall and breaks
up earlier in the spring. Because of stronger winds and more unpredictable weather
patterns, it is becoming more dangerous
for the Inuit to travel along the ice, which
they use as a platform to access their hunting grounds. James Ford, assistant professor
of geography at McGill University and head
of the Climate Change Adaptation Research
group, has estimated that for the Iqaluit region, the hunting season has been reduced
by nearly 45 days between 1982 and 2010
James Simonee with a narwhal tusk.
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it—19.2 percent between 2001 and 2011—
puts increasing pressure on the availability
of food and on sharing networks that the
Inuit have always traditionally relied on.
“In Iqaluit, there are not as many ringed
seals as there were, [and] caribou are not
as close as they used to be,” says Leesee Papatsie, an Iqaluit resident. “There are lots of
people so it is harder to harvest compared
to some communities.”
Papatsie, a mother of five children, is
one of the founders of the Facebook group
“Feeding My Family,” started in May 2012 to
protest the high cost of food in Nunavut. In
just a few months, the group grew to more
than 20,000 members, and was used to organize food price demonstrations in several
communities across Nunavut, as well as in
Ottawa in the summer and fall.
Access to traditional foods is shrinking, thanks to climate change, while store-bought food
remains economically out of reach.
icebreakers to ship the ore through Arctic
waters year round via Foxe Basin and Hudson Strait.
In September 2012, the project was approved by the Nunavut Impact Review
Board and in December by the Minister of
Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. Negotiations are under way toward
finalizing an Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement, which would clear the way for the
corporation to apply for permits.
Close to the bone
It is still unclear what these industrial development projects will mean for the Arctic in
the long term, but the Inuit are already feeling the effects of global pollution. The Inuit
Health Survey, conducted by the Centre
for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment at McGill University, found that
43 percent of Inuit women of childbearing
age in Nunavut have blood mercury levels above Health Canada guidelines. That
finding led to the Nunavut Department of
Health recently advising women of childbearing age to avoid ringed seal liver due
to its high mercury content. Mercury can
affect brain development in children and
unborn babies.
“When we look at where the mercury is
coming from, it is global pollution because
everywhere we are using more energy,” explains Laurie Chan, a toxicologist with the
University of Ottawa.
While indigenous food types are still important to Inuit cultural and social identity,
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Planning February 2013
the lack of financial resources and time severely constrains their ability to secure traditional food sources. Hunting gear, snowmobiles, and powerboats are expensive to
acquire and maintain, which drastically
reduces the number of people who can go
out hunting.
“Hunting is always a gamble. There is no
assurance that you are going to be successful, and what is being gambled is money. It
is no longer just time and energy but scarce
dollars as well, so you either have to be very
confident in your skills and the environment or have sufficient money that if you
guess wrong you can go out and hunt another day,” says George Wenzel, a cultural
ecologist in the department of geography at
McGill University.
Those who have the money to hunt typically hold full-time jobs and can only hunt
on the weekends, and those who have more
time to go out hunting cannot afford to do
so. Consequently, traditional foods have
significantly declined in the last few decades
in the North.
According to the Inuit Health Survey,
traditional food makes up only about 16
percent of the caloric intake of Inuit in
Nunavut, down from over 23 percent in
1999. Wenzel, who studied the local community of Clyde River on Baffin Island, indicates that in 2001 there were 233 grams
of traditional food available per person
and per day in that region, down from 843
grams in 1980.
The rapid population growth of Inu-
Challenges
Changing environmental conditions combined with difficult socioeconomic conditions severely impact food security. Not
only are the Inuit less able to bring traditional food to the table, but they often cannot afford store-bought foods, either. Food
imported to the region is quite expensive
because of the distance it must travel.
Sara Statham, who recently completed
her master’s degree at McGill University,
discovered that 54 percent of public housing residents did not have enough money
for groceries and could not get traditional
food during the winter of 2010–2011, when
the sea ice froze two months later than the
long-term average in Iqaluit.
In 2010, data released from the Inuit
Child Health Survey found that nearly 70
percent of Inuit preschoolers in Nunavut
live in food-insecure homes. This food crisis has prompted the government of Nunavut to announce plans to establish a food
security coalition with Inuit organizations.
“We need to make sure that the resiliency of [traditional] food that is harvested locally remains strong and at the same
time ensure that the right foods are being
stocked and shelved in the stores and that
they are made affordable,” says Terry Audla,
whose group ITK has formed a National Inuit Food Security Working Group. ”If Inuit
lived in the south, they would be amazing
farmers and harvesters. But they live in the
north and they prefer to live in the north.” n
Isabelle Groc is a freelance writer and photographer
based in Vancouver, British Columbia. See more of her
work at www.tidelife.ca.
ON A RELATED TOP IC
Photo courtesy Joyce Rowley
Lobsters Under
Threat
The American lobster, a New England
icon and the focus of a multimillion
dollar fishing industry, is believed
to be disappearing due to increasing
ocean temperatures caused by climate
change. In a recent study, researchers
Robert Glenn, senior biologist with
the Massachusetts Division of Marine
Fisheries, and Richard Wahle, marine
biologist at the University of Maine’s
Darling Marine Center, found that
the young-of-the year
or “crickets” were
“The
nonexistent in the area
forecast is
between eastern Long
dire.
Island and Martha’s
There is
Vineyard in 2010 and
no happy
2011.
ending to
“The trends in
this.”
population
abundance
Robert Glenn,
senior biologist with
are not localized
the Massachusetts
but are happening
Division of
in Buzzards Bay,
Marine Fisheries
Rhode Island Sound,
Narragansett Bay,
Long Island Sound, and the offshore
canyons south of Cape Cod. All
show similar declines in population
abundance,” Glenn said. Epizootic
shell diseases, oil spills, and fishing
mortality, on the other hand, have
local impacts.
The first year of a lobster’s life is
spent as a larva drifting in the top
three feet of the ocean. It then settles
as a tiny five-millimeter cricket in the
shelter of bays and estuaries, where it
will spend the next five years growing
to adulthood.
At water temperatures higher
than 68°F, egg-bearing females seek
cooler, deeper water offshore. If eggs
hatch offshore, currents may not bring
larvae to their usual habitat, the study
found. And if the crickets make it
inshore these days, they are reaching
sounds, bays, and estuaries with
record temperatures.
Glenn said that for the first time
in over 70 years of data collection,
water temperature in the study area
exceeded 68°F for more days than
Rhode Island lobsterman Lanny Dellinger with a cricket. These young lobsters are disappearing.
the longterm average in 13 of the last
16 years. Surface temperatures hit a
record 78°F in parts of Buzzards Bay
in 2009.
Gulf of Maine lobsters are doing
better, Wahle said, perhaps because
the Labrador Current offsets higher
ocean temperatures. But this past
summer saw increases in water
temperatures there as well.
And loss of lobster crickets now
means depletion of adult lobsters in
five to seven years, or by 2020.
“The forecast is dire. There is no
happy ending to this,” said Glenn. n
Joyce Rowley
Rowley is a freelance writer and a former
planner. A version of this article was originally
published in the March 2012 issue of
Commercial Fisheries News.
American Planning Association
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