Food Security in the High North: Contemporary Challenges Across the Circumpolar Region

This book explores the challenges facing food security, sustainability, sovereignty, and supply chains in the Arctic, with a specific focus on Indigenous Peoples.

Offering multidisciplinary insights and with a particular focus on populations in the European High North region, the book highlights the importance of accessible and sustainable traditional foods for the dietary needs of local and Indigenous Peoples. It focuses on foods and natural products that are unique to this region and considers how they play a significant role towards food security and sovereignty. The book captures the tremendous complexity facing populations here as they strive to maintain sustainable food systems – both subsistent and commercial – and regain sovereignty over traditional food production policies. A range of issues are explored including food contamination risks, due to increasing human activities in the region, such as mining, to changing livelihoods and gender roles in the maintenance of traditional food security and sovereignty. The book also considers processing methods that combine indigenous and traditional knowledge to convert the traditional foods, that are harvested and hunted, into local foods.

This book offers a broader understanding of food security and sovereignty and will be of interest to academics, scholars and policy makers working in food studies; geography and environmental studies; agricultural studies; sociology; anthropology; political science; health studies and biology.

Kamrul Hossain is a research professor and director of the Northern Institute for Environmental and Minority Law at the University of Lapland. He led several research projects with a focus on human rights and human security in the Arctic, and has widely published in these disciplines.

Lena Maria Nilsson is an experienced nutritional epidemiologist with a research focus on traditional Sami food as a determinant of health and on food security in the Arctic. Since 2019, she is the vice director at the Centre for Sami Research at Umeå University, Sweden.

Thora Martina Herrmann is a cultural geographer with expertise in action-research projects in polar regions on place-based Indigenous knowledge and identity and the social-cultural dimensions of human-environment interactions. She works in First Nation, Inuit, Mapuce, and Sámi contexts.