The Development of Fisheries in Greenland, with Focus on Paamiut/Frederikshåb and Sisimiut/Holsteinsborg

• Main Authors: Rasmussen, Rasmus Ole, Hamilton, Lawrence C.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository 2001
• Subjects: Sociology; Greenland; Sisimiut; Paamiut; atlantic cod; Gadus morhua; greenlander*; greenlandic
• Online Access: https://scholars.unh.edu/soc_facpub/453; https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1452&context=soc_facpub

Situated along a mountainous coastline between cold seas and continental ice, Greenland’s human populations face severe environmental constraints. Both individual and cultural survival have always depended upon flexible use of the available resources and, when these fail, relocation. The 20th century saw great transitions, notably from Danish colonial to Greenlandic Home Rule government; an almost fivefold increase in population (from 12,000 to 56,000); and from a seal-hunting subsistence economy to commercial fisheries in a new global marketplace. But throughout these transitions, the economy remained tied to renewable resources, and therefore could not transcend the underlying environmental constraints. Greenland’s 20th century history demonstrates anew the adaptive necessities of flexible resource use and relocation, in this tough and highly variable environment. At the beginning of the 20th century, most Greenlanders lived by subsistence hunting and fishing. Seals were their staple resource. Seal populations were falling, however, due to overhunting throughout the northern Atlantic. Warming seas and retreating ice margins around southwest Greenland made the remaining seals less accessible to hunters there as well. At the same time the settlement populations, and their material needs, were increasing. The traditional seal-hunting livelihood thus grew untenable, and alternatives were urgently needed. Commercial fisheries—particularly for Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), which began to appear abundantly with warming waters off southwest Greenland during the 1920s—provided just such an alternative (Mattox 1973). Investment in commercial cod fishing, initially under the direction of Danish planners (especially following recommendations of the Greenland Commission of 1948, published in 1950) and after 1979 Greenland’s own Home Rule government, built up Greenland’s capacity to capture and market this resource as the basis for a new modern economy. Unfortunately, as with seals before them, cod populations fell under the ...