Last Updated: 2002-10-10 10:00:17 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Paul de Bendern

SAARISELKA, Finland (Reuters) - The Inuit, an indigenous people of the Arctic, will stick to a traditional diet including whale blubber despite mounting pollution from industrial toxins and worries about global warming.

"We realize that the wildlife we very much rely on is being contaminated and affecting our bodies," said Duane Smith, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) in Canada.

"But at this time it is still more nutritious to eat them," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a two-day foreign ministers' conference in Arctic Finland ending on Thursday.

The Inuit have hunted marine mammals for thousands of years but their health and livelihood are now threatened by climate change and man-made toxins.

Marine species like whales and seals are part of the 150,000-strong Inuit's diet and livelihood and Western-style foods do not give all the nutrition needed to live in the harsh Arctic environment.

The Inuit in Canada and Greenland have the world's highest exposure to several persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and mercury because of their high intake of fatty tissues such as the blubber of marine mammals.

New research has revealed that a high intake of marine mammals leads to higher levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are mixtures of chemicals and potentially cancer causing.

HIGH CANCER MORTALITY RATE

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), a unit of the inter-governmental Arctic Council, found the Inuit had a higher mortality rate from cancer than other indigenous populations scattered throughout the Arctic.

"It is alarming and our people are scared," said Smith of the ICC, which represents the Inuit across the Arctic region.

Governments in the Arctics pledged at the foreign ministers' conference in Saariselka, a town 160 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to lobby for the ban on or restriction of pollutants that travel to the sensitive region.

Scientists told governments they feared the mercury levels in some Arctic indigenous people were high enough to affect children's development, possibly through breast feeding.

"But the benefits outweigh the risks so breast feeding should continue," AMAP Chairman Helgi Jensson said.

Signs of climate change are increasingly apparent in the Arctic, which is already suffering from a thinning ozone layer.

"Some of our communities are eroding into the oceans in front of our eyes because of the decrease in the multi-layered ice, which is allowing for larger storms to roll in," Smith said.

The reduction of the permanent ice was also affecting food resources because it was harder to hunt and animals were changing behavior, particularly polar bears. Salmon were also appearing more in the Arctic, threatening other species.

"What we are facing is very serious," Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham told Reuters. "The Arctic is the dumping ground for the rest of the world...it is definitely having a serious effect on the food chain."

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