Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

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Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

are regarded as waste and are thrown away and not used for food production or economic development. In this modernized processing of reindeer, I believe that as much as sixty percent of the reindeer is not utilized. The bulk slaughtering of calves in our industry has been a major threat to women’s active participation in Sámi reindeer herding, since the raw materials that Sámi women traditionally used are no longer available, thereby forcing us away from the herding business. If the traditional materials for clothes and food production are not available, the specialized language and traditional knowledge related to these processes will disappear. The calf slaughtering strategy imposed upon us as a reindeer herding people, has so impacted women’s roles and perspectives in reindeer husbandry that this is having significant consequences for the continued survival of family based reindeer husbandry as we once knew it.” Inger Anita Smuk, reindeer herder from eastern Finnmark, Chair of Board of International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry 7.2.2 Governance Across most of the western Barents Region there has been a broad-basedmovement toward indigenous self-determination. In Scandinavia there are Sámi parliaments that are directly elected by Sámi. Sámi parliaments have been directly elected by Sámi since 1989 in Norway (www.sametinget.no), 1993 in Sweden (www.sametinget.se), and 1996 in Finland (whose parliament was preceded by a ‘Sámi delegation’ established in 1973) (www.samediggi.fi). The idea that there could be an institution that could speak on behalf of Sámi is an old one – Sámi pioneer Elsa Laula Renberg wrote on this in the early 1900s 13 . In 1988, the Constitution of Norway was amended to include the rights of the Sámi people: “The authorities of the state shall create conditions enabling the Sami people to preserve and develop its language, culture and way of life”. 14 In recent times, much political and academic Sámi energy has been expended on the Draft Nordic Sámi Convention 15 , the ratification of ILO 169 16 and in Norway, the Finnmark Act 17 . Pan-Sámi cooperation is channeled through the Saami Council (established in 1956), a non-governmental organization comprising Sámi member organizations in Finland, Russia, Norway and Sweden.The main task of the Saami Council is to consolidate the feeling of affinity among the Sámi people, to attain recognition for the Sámi as a nation and to maintain the cultural, political, economic and social rights of the Sámi in the legislation of the four states and in agreements between states and Sámi representative organizations. The political

production rose, as a natural result of the cycles, prices were not allowed to fall and massive stocks of unsold reindeer meat were frozen for stockpiling and future consumption. That the sale of reindeer meat had gradually been taken over by the Farmers’ Cooperative ( Norsk Kjøtt ) – where the reindeer herders had little economic interest – compounded the problem. It is clear that it was more profitable for the Farmers’ Cooperative to have the government pay them for large-scale stockpiling of reindeer meat than to make efforts to sell the meat belonging to the Sámi. Prices were also prevented from rising when reindeer meat experienced a natural fall in production volume. Therefore a fairly normal downturn of production in the 1990s led to an economic disaster for many reindeer herders: production volume shrank dramatically but the government-fixed price was not allowed to rise. From a peak price (all prices in NOK 2013) for reindeer meat of NOK 108 per kilogram in 1976, the price fell to NOK 51 per kilogram in 1990, a year when total production was very low. From a political perspective most parties in the Norwegian parliament failed to recognize that the reindeer herders were trapped in a collectivist system fromwhich they should be freed.A new production paradigm, exemplified by Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution was presented at the 2016World Economic Forum in Davos (Schwab, 2016), in which economies of scale in hierarchies are replaced by economies of scope in networks , a mode of production surprisingly close to the traditional production system of reindeer herders. Reindeer herders traditionally work in a system similar to that of a contemporary rideshare arrangement (Horton and Zeckhauser, 2016) with the difference that the core is controlled by an internal system of democratic consensus. As previously indicated, the Sámi invented time-sharing which is now used in a wide range of sectors (holiday apartments, cars, etc.). The Sámi siida also practiced crowdsourcing hundreds of years before the term was invented. The question is whether society at large can free the Sámi reindeer herders from the remnants of the old- fashioned Fordist planned economy so deeply entrenched in the approach of the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture, thus enabling them to recover their status as entrepreneurs in the new economy where they provide sustainability and where world markets are eager to embrace their healthy and exotic products. See Reinert (2006, 2008) for a deeper analysis of the points raised here. The intense centralization and ‘modernization’ process has had a deleterious effect on role of women in reindeer husbandry: “The main challenge in Sámi reindeer husbandry today is that a large part of the raw materials of the slaughtered reindeer such as skin, bones, heads, blood and intestines

13 In 1904, Renberg wrote and published a 30-page pamphlet in Swedish entitled Infor lif eller död? Sanningsord i de Lappska förhållandena [ Do we face life or death? Words of truth about the Lappish situation ] 14 https://stortinget.no/globalassets/pdf/english/constitutionenglish.pdf 15 The Draft Nordic Sámi Convention is an agreement between Sámi and the governments of Norway,Sweden and Finland intending to harmonize legislation and other regulation of significance for Sámi activities across nation-state borders. The working group submitted a draft in 2005 to the Nordic ministers in charge of Sámi affairs and the presidents of the three Sámi Parliaments for their approval but the negotiations have been stalled particularly by the governments of Sweden and Finland. 16 Established in 1989, ratified by Norway (1990) but not Finland (rejected in 2015) nor Sweden, ILO 169 is a major binding international convention concerning Indigenous Peoples, and a forerunner of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::N O::P12100_ILO_CODE:C169 17 The Finnmark act attempts to strengthen the Sámi rights, by giving the entire population of Finnmark greater influence over property in the county. However, the act does not cover fishing rights in saltwater, mining, or oil rights.