Cambridge Bay commercial muskox harvest on hold

MIRIAM HILL

The 2003 commercial muskox harvest in Cambridge Bay has been cancelled and the chair of the muskox harvest working group says the earliest a commercial harvest could be back up and running is the spring of 2005.

George Bohlender, the chair of the group, which has representatives from eight stakeholder organizers including the Kitikmeot Economic Development Corporation, the Hamlet of Cambridge Bay and Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, said the last commercial harvest was in 2001.

The commercial harvest differs from a domestic harvest in that meat from the commercial harvest is sold to the Kitikmeot Foods plant in Cambridge Bay, which must meet Canadian Food Inspection Agency regulations in terms of the how the meat is slaughtered and processed.

The group determined that it would have cost about $460,000 to launch a harvest this spring. The money would have been spent to set up a temporary camp and abattoir for a month and cover the operational costs of the hunt.

But there are new food inspection regulations on the horizon — the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point System — which would mean another outlay of money for next spring’s hunt.

“It would have been a Band Aid fix just to get a harvest done for this year and then come next year we would have been looking at either add-ons to what we bought or some entirely new sort of infrastructure,” Bohlender said.

The potential of the commercial hunt has never really been assessed, he said, and that needs to be done before a major flow of dollars is put toward it.

Bohlender said the market for qiviut, the woolly under fur of the muskox, is in high demand throughout the world right now and little attention has been paid to other byproducts from the animal.

“With the kind of infrastructure we’ve been using over the past few years to do the harvest, that infrastructure has really been limited in the number of animals that can be processed through the facility,” he said.

Now, hunters look at taking about 300 or 400 animals per year, which brings in about $170,000 in meat and hides. With better infrastructure and a more refined processing system, Bohlender estimates at least double the number of animals can be harvested and processed.

A call for proposals is going out in the next few weeks for a thorough analysis of the commercial harvest, complete with a business plan. The group hopes to receive a business plan by the fall, which is too late to order supplies on the sealift. That means a commercial hunt won’t realistically begin before the spring of 2005.

While the commercial harvest is on hold, Bohlender said, the muskox population continues to grow out of control.

“There are fears that if some of the animals aren’t taken then the population is going to crash and then there won’t be enough to do anything with in the future,” he said. “The plan is for this year and next year the HTO will embark on the domestic harvest and take 300 to 400 animals per year and satisfy the community in terms of meat.”

The hunt will also provide some hides to the qiviut muskox project, which has been for all intents and purposes suspended since the commercial harvest was stopped.