The Bioeconomy of the Arctic

1. The Bioeconomy of the Arctic Haraldur Hallgrímsson Sigrún Elsa Smáradóttir Torfi Jóhannesson

2. Nice barley field

3. Why are the mountains white?

4. The harvest

5. Growing conditions in EU and Iceland Good condtions Severly limiting Very severly limiting Growth Days Day-degrees

6. Why are we doing this? • Food security • Rural development • ... • And how do we do this?

7. State support • To stimulate production • production based direct supprt • To secure agricultural land use • Hectare support • To increase productivity • Investment support • To facilitate sustainable production methods • Environmental payments

8. Food security • Are the tomatoes fresh? • Are there any tomatoes? • Is there any food?

9. Food security • Generally high levels of self-sufficiency in Iceland and the rest of Scandinavia due to high support level and import restrictions • Lower levels in Faroe Islands and Greenland • Different situation in Russia, Canada and Alaska

10. The challenge is competitievness • How can barley production in Iceland become competitive with barley from the EU?

11. Uniqueness

12. Specialization and food security • Specialization does not provide food security but it gives the potential • ....and it gives positive rural development

13. Population density 1/6 of Finland

15. Agricultural communities Population development Fishing communities

16. Bottom line: • Bigger cities are the drivers of population development • Agriculture and fisheries alone cannot be the backbones of future population development

17. Primary production has the general tendency to increase efficiency = reduce labor CAPITAL LABOR TIME

18. When resources are fixed, employment is bound to go down CAPITAL LABOR TIME

19. Solutions • To find new resources • To get larger share of the value chain

20. Bioeconomy of the Arctic • Research project funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers • Will feed into the Icelandic Chairmanship of the Nordic Council in 2014.

21. What is the Bioeconomy of the Arctic? Semi-wild food and fur production fishing Fresh water Animal husbandry

22. Bioeconomy

23. Main Elements of the Project • Mapping of renewable biological resources • Food Security: Mapping food production, food export and food import • Evaluation of utilization of biological resources and food security in the Arctic • High level conference

24. Arctic Bio-economy: Status Framework for analysis of a bio-economy: • Identify and quantify the biological resources available. • Mapping of production, import and export of goods from biological resources. • Evaluate the utilization of biological resources with regard to economic factors as well as the society and the environment. • The goal is to evaluate to what extent this kind of analysis is possible for the arctic countries and to suggest metrics to use for the analysis. • The framework will make comparison between countries possible.

25. Arcticbioeconomy For furtherinformation on the Artic Bioeconomy project please contact: Sveinn Margeirsson, CEO (sveinn.margeirsson@matis.is) Haraldur Hallgrímsson, division director (hari@matis.is) Sigrún Elsa Smáradóttir, research group leader (sigrun@matis.is)