Slim Allagui, Yahoo News 24 Sep 08;
A European Union proposal to ban imports of seal skins has Greenlandic Inuits worried they could soon face a repeat of boycotts that severely crippled one of their major sources of income two decades ago.
"This is a war against us and we can't accept that," Aqqaluk Lynge, who heads up the Greenlandic branch of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), told AFP.
Seal products certified to result from humane hunting techniques or from traditional hunting by Inuits across the Arctic region would be excluded from the proposed ban, but the indigenous people of Greenland nonetheless fear their livelihoods are at stake.
"Exemptions for Inuits have not worked before, and the ICC's position is that exemptions will not work this time around either," Lynge told an international Arctic conference in the western Greenlandic town of Ilulissat earlier this month.
The ban, proposed by the European Commission in July, is mainly aimed at Canada, where hunters this year were allowed to slaughter 275,000 seals, or nearly a third of the 900,000 seals hunted each year around the globe.
Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory of only 57,000 residents, including 50,000 Inuits, however also relies heavily on seal hunting, counting some 2,300 professional hunters and about 6,500 recreational hunters.
In 2006, the last year for which numbers are available, 113,000 seals were killed off the shores of the island, which unlike Denmark is no longer part of the EU.
Greenland's hunters are all Inuits who according to their representatives do not kill seal pups and only kill adult seals with a virtually painless shot to the head.
But while they in theory should not be affected by a potential EU ban, they fear they could soon see their markets shrivel as they did 20 years ago when boycotts aimed especially at halting inhumane hunting practices targeting baby seals nearly wiped out the entire industry.
Public opinion "does not distinguish between Canadian and Greenlandic hunters, something we noticed in the 1980s," the island's former deputy prime minister Josef Motzfeldt lamented to AFP.
For years seal pelts, meat and fat, which is used in beauty products, were shunned around the globe, and even today prices remain 75 percent lower than before the boycotts, forcing authorities to heavily subsidise Greenland's struggling hunters.
"It is very worrying that the Commission is not aware of the serious consequences its proposal will have for people who live off of this ancestral hunt," Greenland's local foreign minister Aleqa Hammond told AFP at the Ilulissat conference.
"We have not changed our hunting technique for 100 years and it is not cruel," insisted Hammond, who plans to address the European Parliament when it debates the issue this autumn.
In Ilulissat, Arkalo, a fisher and hunter who refused to give his last name, castigated Brussels as he dried two seal skins on his balcony.
"We really don't need this new blow, because we have barely recovered from the boycott campaigns by Greenpeace and other Brigitte Bardots (referring to the French actress and animal rights activist) against the massacre of baby seals in Canada that hurt us so much," he said.
Many hunters and their families are still dependent on local government handouts to survive.
Lynge of the ICC insisted the new proposed ban would again "hurt the small and sustainable, community-based market developed by Inuits across the Arctic."
"We are again the victims, but we are ready nevertheless to work with the EU on re-examining this ban and finding a solution," he said.
The EU commissioner responsible for Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, Joe Borg, attempted at the conference in Ilulissat to justify the Commission's proposal.
"The European public opinion with regard to seal hunting, especially what is portrayed in the media, is such that the Commission felt that it had to take action," he explained to AFP, stressing that "if the seals are hunted in a humane way and a proper manner then no negative economic impact should be sustained."
Nonetheless, Greenland's minister of hunting, fisheries and agriculture, Finn Karlsen, has called on "the seal skin industry to intensify its efforts in markets outside the EU, like Russia, China and the rest of Asia," in order to minimise any potential negative impact of the ban.
"Seal hunting will always be an essential part of the (Inuit) way of life and culture in all the towns and villages in Greenland and makes up the primary livelihood in the most remote hamlets," he said.
As for claims that the hunt is threatening the seal species, Karlsen pointed out that Greenland hunts around 100,000 seals each year out of an estimated population of about seven million animals, stressing that the sea mammals also deplete the island's much-needed fish stocks.
