Greenland's receding ice has exposed vast deposits of valuable minerals and new opportunities for an island in economic decline. |
By Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, September 18, 2012
NUUK, Greenland —
With Arctic ice melting at record pace, the world’s superpowers are
increasingly jockeying for political influence and economic position in
outposts like this one, previously regarded as barren wastelands.
At stake are the Arctic’s abundant supplies of oil, gas and minerals that are, thanks to climate change, becoming newly accessible
along with increasingly navigable polar shipping shortcuts. This year, China
has become a far more aggressive player in this frigid field, experts say,
provoking alarm among Western powers.
While the United States, Russia and several nations of the European
Union have Arctic territory, China has none, and as a result, has been
deploying its wealth and diplomatic clout to secure toeholds in the region.
“The Arctic has risen rapidly on China’s foreign policy agenda in the
past two years,” said Linda Jakobson, East Asia program director at the Lowy
Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia. So, she said, the
Chinese are exploring “how they could get involved.”
In August, China sent its first ship across the Arctic to
Europe and it is lobbying intensely for permanent observer status on the Arctic
Council, the loose international body of eight Arctic nations that develops
policy for the region, arguing that it is a “near Arctic state” and proclaiming
that the Arctic is “the inherited wealth of all humankind,” in the words of
China’s State Oceanic Administration.
To promote the council bid and improve relations with Arctic nations,
its ministers visited Denmark, Sweden and Iceland this summer, offering
lucrative trade deals. High-level diplomats have also visited Greenland, where
Chinese companies are investing in a developing mining industry, with proposals
to import Chinese work crews for construction.
Western nations have been particularly anxious about Chinese overtures
to this poor and sparsely populated island, a self-governing state within the
Kingdom of Denmark, because the retreat of its ice cap has unveiled coveted
mineral deposits, including rare earth metals that are crucial for new
technologies like cellphones and military guidance systems. A European Union
vice president, Antonio Tajani, rushed here to Greenland’s capital in June,
offering hundreds of millions in development aid in exchange for guarantees
that Greenland would not give China exclusive access to its rare earth metals,
calling his trip “raw mineral diplomacy.”
Greenland is close to North America, and home to the United States Air
Force’s northernmost base in Thule. At a conference last month, Thomas R.
Nides, deputy secretary of state for management and resources, said the Arctic was becoming “a new frontier
in our foreign policy.”
In the past 18 months, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and
President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea have made debut visits here, and
Greenland’s prime minister, Kuupik Kleist, was welcomed by President José
Manuel Barroso of the European Commission in Brussels.
“We are treated so differently than just a few years ago,” said Jens
B. Frederiksen, Greenland’s vice premier, in his simple office here. “We are
aware that is because we now have something to offer, not because they’ve
suddenly discovered that Inuit are nice people.”
Chinese activity in the Arctic to some extent mirrors that of other
non-Arctic countries, as the region warms.
The European Union, Japan and South Korea have also applied in the last
three years for permanent observer status at the Arctic
Council, which would allow them to present their perspective, but
not vote.
This once-obscure body, previously focused on issues like monitoring
Arctic animal populations, now has more substantive tasks, like defining future
port fees and negotiating agreements on oil spill remediation. “We’ve changed from a
forum to a decision-making body,” said Gustaf Lind, Arctic ambassador from
Sweden and the council’s current chairman.
But China sees its inclusion “as imperative so that it won’t be shut
out from decisions on minerals and shipping,” said Dr. Jakobson, who is also an
Arctic researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
China’s economy is heavily dependent on exports, and the polar route saves
time, distance and money to and from elsewhere in Asia and Europe, compared
with traversing the Suez Canal.
So far there has been little actual exploitation of Arctic resources.
Greenland has only one working mine, though more than 100 new sites are being
mapped out. Here, as well as in Alaska, Canada and Norway, oil and gas
companies are still largely exploring, although experts estimate that more than
20 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves are in the Arctic. Warmer
weather has already extended the work season by a month in many locations,
making access easier.
At one point this summer, 97 percent of the surface of Greenland’s
massive ice sheet was melting. At current rates, Arctic waters
could be ice-free in summer by the end of the decade, scientists say.
“Things
are happening much faster than what any scientific model predicted,” said Dr.
Morten Rasch, who runs the Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring program at Aarhus
University in Denmark.
Ownership of the
Arctic is governed by the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, which gives Arctic nations an
exclusive economic zone that extends 200 nautical miles from land, and to
undersea resources farther away so long as they are on a continental shelf. The
far northern Arctic Ocean belongs to no country, and conditions there are
severe. In a place where exact boundaries were never much of a concern,
haggling over borders has begun among the primary nations — between Canada and
Denmark, and the United States and Canada, for example.
The United States has been hampered in the current jockeying because
the Senate has refused to ratify the Convention
of the Law of the Sea, even though both the Bush and Obama
administrations have strongly supported doing so. This means the United States
has not been able to formally stake out its underwater boundaries. “We are
being left behind,” Deputy Secretary Nides said.
But experts say boundary disputes are likely to be rapidly resolved
through negotiation, so that everyone can get on with the business of making
money. There is “very little room for a race to grab territory, since most of
the resources are in an area that is clearly carved up already,” said Kristofer
Bergh, a researcher at the Stockholm Institute.
Even so, Arctic nations and NATO are building up military capabilities
in the region, as a precaution. That has left China with little choice but to
garner influence through a strategy that has worked well in Africa and Latin
America: investing and joining with local companies and financing good works to
earn good will. Its scientists have become pillars of multinational Arctic
research, and their icebreaker has been used in joint expeditions.
And Chinese companies, some with close government ties, are investing
heavily across the Arctic. In Canada, Chinese firms have acquired interests in
two oil companies that could afford them access to Arctic drilling. During a
June visit to Iceland, Premier Wen Jiabao of China signed a number of economic
agreements, covering areas like geothermal energy and free trade.
In Greenland, large Chinese companies are financing the development of
mines that are being developed around discoveries of gems or minerals by small
prospecting companies, said Soren Meisling, head of the China desk at the Bech
Bruun law firm in Copenhagen, which represents many of them. A huge iron ore
mine under development near Nuuk, for example, is owned by a British company
but financed in part by a Chinese steel maker.
Chinese mining companies have proved adept at working in challenging
locales and have even proposed building runways for jumbo jets on the ice in
Greenland’s far north to fly out minerals until the ice melts enough for
shipping.
“There is already a sense of competition in the Arctic, and they think
they can have first advantage,” said Jingjing Su, a lawyer in Bech Bruun’s
China practice.
The efforts have clear political backing. Greenland’s minister for
industry and mineral resources was greeted by Vice Premier Li Keqiang in China
last November. A few months later, China’s minister of land and resources, Xu
Shaoshi, traveled to Greenland to sign cooperation agreements.
Western analysts have worried that China could leverage its wealth,
particularly in some of the cash-poor corners of the Arctic like Greenland and
Iceland.
But Chinese officials have cast their motives in more generous terms.
“China’s activities are for the purposes of regular environmental investigation
and investment and have nothing to do with resource plundering and strategic
control,” the state-controlled Xinhua news agency wrote this year.
Michael Byers, a professor of politics and law at the University of
British Columbia, said the Chinese were unlikely to overstep their rights in a
region populated by NATO members. “Despite the concerns I have about Chinese
foreign policy in other parts of the world, in the Arctic it is behaving
responsibly,” he said. “They just want to make money.”
Next
February, the Arctic Council is scheduled to choose the countries that will be
granted permanent observer status, which requires unanimity vote. Though
Iceland, Denmark and Sweden now openly support China’s bid, the United States
State Department, contacted for comment, declined to say how it would vote.
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