Greenland’s Resilience and Environmental Empowerment through Networks of Food and Organic Development

Challenges related to food systems and environmental sustainability are increasingly intertwined, particularly in contexts where intensive and deterritorialised food systems are being called into question. Given its geographical remoteness from the world’s main food distribution networks, the fact that food prices were 36% higher in Greenland than in Denmark in 2016 (Burchardt, 2019), and the pace of global warming being three to four times faster in the Arctic than in the rest of the planet during the past four decades (IPCC, 2023; Rantanen et al., 2022), Greenland represents a compelling case study for examining the interplay between food resilience and environmental changes.
 
Unveiling the roles, dynamics, and actors of food resilience in relation to processes of transition, reterritorialization, and empowerment requires a careful consideration of strategies aimed at relocalising and diversifying food production, in order to respond to the ongoing food (Loudiyi et al., 2022a,b) and environmental transitions Greenland is undergoing. In geography, discussing resilience entails addressing the risks and the environmental, political, and social disruptions that challenge the territorial organization of societies (Adger, 2000). However, in the Western imagination, the North is assigned to a conservatory of wilderness and cold threatened by climate change (Benediktsson, 2007, 2008, 2014; Chartier, 2018; Delmas, 2014; Laslaz and Girault, coord., 2020). These environmental changes have direct consequences for food systems, particularly for Greenlandic hunting, fishing and gathering practices (Arnason, 2007; Danto et al., 2023; Ford & Goldhar, 2012)-practices that local stakeholders strive to preserve through heritage-making (Parmantier, 2023b, 2024; Poiret, 2020; Ren & Becker Jacobsen, 2023). However, these disruptions affect societies that possess adaptive capacities and represent themselves as adaptable (Michel-Guillou et al., 2017). In this regard, resilience will not be understood as the return to an initial state after a shock, as envisaged by natural science (Holling, 1973), but the capacity of a society to adapt to environmental, socio-economic or political pressure through diversification, self-organization and learning (Dauphiné & Provitolo, 2007). In this context, food resilience is conceived as a policy, a goal, and a process aiming to strengthen food security by increasing domestic production capacity (Parmantier, 2023c) and by securing global imports (Brial et al., 2022; Chang, 2009), thereby overcoming the limits of food self-sufficiency and free trade.
 
Thus, the question of food resilience in Greenland will be approached through the lens of agriculture, hunting and gathering practices, as well as through the capacity of local stakeholders to pass on an endangered heritage, consisting of both knowledge (animal territories, gathering sites, medicinal plant identification) and skills (butchering, preserving, and preparing hunted and fished catches) that are essential to maintain a cultural link with the Inuit roots of Indigenous populations. These traditional-albeit modernized-skills play a vital role in food resilience by enabling communities to make optimal use of available resources and to adapt to environmental and socio-economic change.