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Arctic Yearbook 2014
daily commuting between settlements. This implies that the Greenlandic economy is not coherent,
but can be characterized as a number of interconnected island economies. One of the major results
is that there exists only little trade between the settlements. Only around 15% of ship cargo is
transported between Greenlandic settlements, while around 50% are imports from Denmark, and
approx. 35% are exports to or through Denmark (Hendriksen 2012).
For both individual settlements and Greenland as a whole, the traditional exploitation of marine
living resources increasingly has been moved from locally-based fishing and hunting, to large, oceangoing trawlers with some processing and freezing on board selling directly to ports outside
Greenland, or landed in Greenland ready for export. Most of the raw materials are today exported
unprocessed. This means that the impact on employment and thus value for the communities where
seafood processing still exists is modest, and that the settlement’s localization in reality is de-coupled
from its sources of income. Only a small number of settlements still exist where the primary
economic base is linked to the exploitation of marine living resources and where the vast majority of
the inhabitants and workforce is of Greenlandic origin. For major towns, the primary income base
has become the maintenance of society’s basic operations, including administration, health,
education, retail supplies, telecommunication, construction, etc. (Ibid.)
Policies of Centralization
In the government commission reports from the 1950s and 1960s on economic and social
development, policies for centralization were evident in their emphasis on economic developments
based on private business activities. After WWII the traditional trade monopoly of the Royal
Greenland Trading Company was cancelled while its duties of provision were continued. The goal
was to provide a ground for private businesses to make the Inuit society independent (self-sufficient)
concerning economic incomes and supply.
At first fishing and fish processing were identified as the new core industry, in combination with
increased utilization of the mineral resources in Greenland (Grønlands-kommissionen 1950). There
were no customs and import restrictions and government taxes were kept low (Boserup 1963). Some
new business activities started in this period, but the owners were primarily persons from Denmark
and they concentrated on supply activities taken over from colonial Royal Greenland.
Realizing that private business could not deliver the needed industrial development in Greenland,
the Danish government began in the late 1950s to stimulate this through massive investments in the
fish processing industry. In parallel, massive investments in public schools, education, public
housing and health care were funded through Danish subsidies (Grønlands-udvalget 1964; Boserup
1963).
In the wake of these investments that placed fisheries as the core business activity, policies were set
up to centralize the population in larger cities with harbours and fish processing industries. But
unfortunately the mono-culture based fishing activities did not continue to grow and private fish
processing industries went bankrupt or were taken over by the government. The privatized growth
strategy had largely failed. The only private economic actors that survived were those involved in
Mineral Exploitation & Development in Greenland