Malcolm Brabant writes:  Greenland’s Inuit chefs, clad in sealskin outfits and trousers fashioned from polar bear fur, will not be offended if MEPs decline morsels of the whiskered marine mammal from the grill. But the chefs hope that their planned cookery session will help to convince European lawmakers to reverse what they regard as a misguided ban on the importation of seal products that is driving a centuries-old way of life to the edge of extinction.

Exports of seal pelts have plummeted by 90% since the introduction of the European ban in 2009. The impact on subsistence economies in Greenland’s 60 coastal communities has been catastrophic. “It’s a tragic situation for us,” says Karl Lyberth, a hunter who used to be Greenland’s minister of fishing, agriculture and food. “A lot of people in the EU don’t understand our way of life.”

A delegation of Greenland seal hunters will board a bus in Copenhagen on Monday for the journey to Strasbourg to lobby parliamentarians.

They are steeling themselves for a clash of cultures and a struggle to change public perceptions. The hunters’ main hurdle is to overcome the image promulgated by animal welfare campaigners of helpless cuddly baby seals being clubbed to death on ice floes in Canada.

International public outrage at the annual Canadian cull contributed in no small way to the European moratorium. “To a large extent it’s the last call for a lot of the hunters,’ says Rasmus Holm of Inuit Sila, the Greenlandic Hunters and Fishermen’s Association. “If the current crisis continues, they won’t have any alternative but to claim social security.”