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Arctic Yearbook 2015
According to the Greenlandic geologist Ole Christiansen, former Managing Director of
NunaMinerals, Greenland is still not a competitive mining country and missed its chance when the
prices on minerals were
good a few years ago. A Photo Credit: Lill Rastad Bjørst
representative from the
Danish business community, Managing Director for PensionDanmark Torben Möger Pedersen,
characterized the upcoming mineral sector in Greenland as a risky investment and was advocating for
minimizing what he called “political risk.” Managing Director from the confederation of Danish
Industry Karsten Dybvad likewise identified Greenland’s structural problems as critical and compared
the economic situation that Greenland is faced at the moment, to the one Denmark experienced in
the 1980’s. What the Danish keynote speakers asked for was that the Greenlandic Parliament would
facilitate a more stable investment climate and go for the longtime planning, so investors knew what
to expect. Dybvad said “All over the world we have to ask ourselves – what are we going to live from
in the future?” This is now the current problem for Greenland.
Tourism in the Arctic: a low hanging fruit?
As a solution to the “problem”, investment in existing industries was mentioned in most of the talks
(like fishing, tourism and entrepreneurship). Experiences from Iceland with mass tourism was
presented and while the politicians in Greenland right now believe in development in the tourism
sector as the “low hanging fruit” the industry identifies a lot of challenges. The director of the Icelandic
Tourism Research Center, Edward Huijbens recommended a more conservative approach to tourism
development. For tourism development to be to the benefit of Greenland, he said that it needs to be
driven by the interest of the local industry. Managing Director of Visit Greenland, Anders
Steenbakken chaired a workshop with the title “While we are waiting for the investments” centered
on how tourism could develop in the long run. He mentioned that Greenland of course needed a
better infrastructure and basic knowledge of “tourist reasons to go” was the key to development in
the Greenlandic tourism sector. The workshop was aiming at encouraging the Greenlandic business
community to think of new innovative ways to support the tourism sector and via entrepreneurship
to develop new products and platforms for corporation.
The minister for Industry, Labour and Trade, Vittus Qujaukitsoq (Siumut) has recently developed a
plan to simulate the tourism sector in Greenland. The themes are: 1. Infrastructure, 2. Tax structure,
3. Framework conditions and 4. Tourism concessions. “It has to be easy and not too expensive to
travel around the country”, he said to the business magazine Aurora before the conference
(Holmsgaard 2015: 18). To solely stage tourism as the savior and fixer of the economy is problematic
because future tourism development is challenged by a number of factors in Greenland. In 2014, a
report produced by the large Nordic consultancy firm of Rambøll identified the most important
factors as being a short tourism season, a lack of infrastructure, the current limited capacity, the low
standards of customer service, low growth rate, a lack of package tours, the low average of overnight
stays (only four in average) the low spending per tourist (1.100 kroner per day), the low priority and
lack of concrete initiatives by the Government of Greenland, the lack of online information about the
destination and the difficulties with internal and external coordination in the Greenlandic tourism
Rastad Bjørst