Pilot Research on Agricultural Growth in a Changing Arctic

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Paragraph 1: Several journalistic accounts report that environmental change in Greenland is expanding possibilities for Greenlandic agriculture. However, environmental change in the Arctic, including in Greenland, Canada and Alaska, is not straightforward in the sense of simply creating opportunities that enables the production of more food and other crops for the Greenlandic population or export. Agricultural history in Greenland goes back over 1000 years and understanding contemporary agricultural changes must be contextualized by a deeper ethnographic inquiry. Greenland offers a compelling window into present-day and historical processes of social and economic change, which anthropological fieldwork and analysis can elaborate and analyze. Understanding agricultural development at high latitudes could prove to be of substantial national interest. This research will provide important insights into the potential of agriculture in other Arctic regions, such as Alaska, and how agricultural development may be developed to provide healthy food and economic opportunity to very remote rural populations with few employment options. Paragraph 2: This project will investigate the environmental and sociocultural characteristics of agriculture in Southern Greenland, and, ultimately, the economic and political implications of agricultural production for the emergence of a potentially independent nation-state in Greenland. This is a proposal to conduct two exploratory research field trips focused upon contemporary agriculture in Southern Greenland in the era of rapid environmental change. The first trip will focus on the capital city of Nuuk, interviewing natural resource managers, government economist, and academics about agricultural potential in Greenland and its social and political context. The second trip will investigate the extent of new agricultural interests and practices through ethnographic interviews in specific farming communities. This EAGER project will not only investigate the extent of agriculture current in Greenland and the aspirations of Inughuit (Greenlandic Inuit) for agricultural production, but the PI is committed to testing a new and developing northern social science methodology of co-producing knowledge with arctic communities. The researcher will work closely with Inughuit to set out a research agenda, and a commitment to training scholars from under-represented communities and regions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.