--:-- Jackie Leonard: This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: A UN-backed review has warned that famine is playing out in Gaza despite the limited increase in aid deliveries. Israel says life in the Palestinian territory is tough, but lies are being told.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: A ceasefire along the Thai-Cambodian border appears to be holding after a shaky start. And the Russian national airline Aeroflot has cancelled 50 more flights today after Ukrainian hackers said they'd attacked its IT systems.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Also in this podcast. For the last three years, I've only been able to plant half my farm because I don't have enough irrigation water. We feel that Mexico has not been living up to their part of the treaty. We'll hear from farmers in the US and Mexico caught in a water crisis driven by a decades-old treaty.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. That's the assessment of a group of UN-backed international agencies after months of an Israeli blockade, which has only recently been eased.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: One woman in Gaza told us how hard it is to get aid. Where are we supposed to go? The Israelis say they don't want to distribute the aid because Hamas might steal it.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And sometimes they allow people to go and get the aid themselves, but they end up fighting each other to get it. That's not to mention the bombs that are killing them anyway.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Every day, more than 500 people are martyred from Rafa to the north while trying to reach the aid.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Yesterday, for the first time, my son went into an aid distribution centre. They took the bag of flour he managed to get, broke his shoulder and stabbed him in the hand with a knife.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Israel has steadily denied that there is starvation in Gaza.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Here's its foreign minister Gideon Saar talking to journalists earlier today. It is clear that after almost two years of war, the situation is tough. But there is a lie. And the lie is the starvation policies which the international media, including BBC, is cooperating with.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And the reality is the opposite. Because we are working very hard under very complicated circumstances from the beginning of the war until this day in order to facilitate the entrance of humanitarian aid into Gaza Strip.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: In a moment, we'll be hearing from our Gaza correspondent Rushdie Abu Alouf.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: First, though, more details on the report itself from Imogen folks in Geneva.
--:-- Imogen Folks: Well, this is the report from the, it's an independent body, it's called the Integrated Food Security Report, and it assesses hunger levels around the world.
--:-- Imogen Folks: And what it says this morning is that the famine threshold has been reached in Gaza, that all the signs are there, acute malnutrition, deaths from hunger, and that this is now present across nearly all of the Gaza Strip.
--:-- Imogen Folks: So it's not I mean, it's a tragedy, but it's not a surprise. We have heard the warnings from the aid agencies who are present in Gaza, talk of perhaps Médecins Sans Frontières, who does a lot with child malnutrition, reporting over the last week, I believe, that the levels of malnourished children it was seeing was really getting up to this.
--:-- Imogen Folks: This is a warning of famine. So here we are. Some aid is coming in, but I heard the World Food Programme in Geneva just half an hour ago saying these airdrops and the humanitarian pauses are just going to be nowhere near enough.
--:-- Imogen Folks: So just to be clear on the terminology, is there or isn't there a famine now?
--:-- Imogen Folks: What the IPC report says is that famine thresholds have been reached or breached in parts of the Gaza Strip. In fact, most of the Gaza Strip.
--:-- Imogen Folks: What we need to be careful about is that, of course, in many places you get more data than you're getting from Gaza.
--:-- Imogen Folks: But what the IPC thinks now is that it has enough in terms of reports from the different aid agencies. They are talking about this is the level of acute malnutrition among the under fives.
--:-- Imogen Folks: This is a key indicator that we saw in July. This is what we saw in June. This is what we saw in May.
--:-- Imogen Folks: So they can extrapolate from that, plus the reported deaths from hunger, which have rocketed in July.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: You know, many more are reported in the last couple of weeks than throughout this conflict.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: That was Imogen folks in Geneva.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: In Gaza itself, the position remains desperate, as our Gaza correspondent Rushdie Abu Alouf told us from Istanbul.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: Well, we understand that in the last 48 hours, about 152 trucks of food were allowed from three different crossings in Gaza, in the north, in the middle, and also in the south.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: But this is not near enough. People are demanding 500 to 600 trucks every day full of food for a month at least in order to overcome this humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: The famine is looming, according to Palestinians. More people are dying in hospitals from a lack of malnutrition.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: Hamasran Health Ministry said about over 100 people died from hunger.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: Also, the airstrikes did not stop at the time where this humanitarian pause is over.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: Last night, according to a new statement by the Hamasran Health Ministry, about 112 people were killed only in the last 24 hours.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: And we've heard reports of looting.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: Just how much of what is getting into the Gaza Strip is actually getting to its intended destination?
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: Well, in fact, based on what we are collecting on the ground and talking to local journalists in different areas, about 95%, maybe 98% of the trucks were looted by not only by gangs, but by, you know, desperate hungry people who are waiting somewhere in the road to stop the trucks and loot whatever they can.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: I've seen a video, about 20 second video of like thousands of people, you know, jumping over a truck and taking what they can.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: There is boxes from the Egyptian Red Cross that contain some food and there is other trucks that carrying flour, which is the most needed item in Gaza.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: One kilo of flour this morning is about $35. dollars.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: There was a little drop of the prices at the beginning of this humanitarian pause, but then suddenly the prices jumped up again.
--:-- Rushdie Abu Alouf: I spoke to a father in Khan Yunis. He said that he didn't eat and his five children did not eat for the last 48 hours and he had to buy the flour in this big price, which he can't afford.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: At least 30 people have died in Beijing as northern China experiences days of heavy rains and flooding.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Tens of thousands have been evacuated The downpours started over the weekend and intensified around Beijing and surrounding provinces
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Our China correspondent Stephen McDonnell is in one of the worst affected areas the Miyun district of Beijing.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: In the mountains around Beijing there's been a mass mobilisation involving the People's Armed Police and other emergency teams.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: There's a roadblock here and there are many like this all around the Miyun Reservoir, stopping people from entering the worst hit areas.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: The government's view is that there have already been too many people dying in this disaster.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: They don't want more names added to that terrible list.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: We've just come from a relief centre. There are 400 people there. Now, they're staying in dormitories, they're being given food and they're pretty happy that they're now in a safer place and they're just waiting to be able to go back in a few days time after the flooding recedes a bit.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: Down in the city ordinary citizens have been told not to come to work but up here in the mountains it's more a question of the authorities controlling all the roads, controlling where people are going.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: The good news for the emergency teams though is that the rain has stopped.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: They've been operating in really terrible conditions with driving rain, heavy, strong flooding.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: Now they've got a bit of a break to reach some of these villages that have been cut off with no electricity, where roads have been washed away.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: But Xi Jinping has warned them, look, you've got to really muck in now because we don't want any more casualties.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: However, the rain is going to come back in the coming days.
--:-- Stephen McDonnell: And so China's leader has also warned they should be preparing for the worst.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Russia's national airline Aeroflot is continuing to experience disruption and flight cancellations after pro-Ukrainian hackers claimed to have attacked its IT systems.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Aeroflot said it had cancelled more than 50 flights on Tuesday, mostly within Russia but also including routes to Belarus and Armenia, which the Kremlin said was worrying.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Our cyber correspondent Joe Tidy is following the story.
--:-- Joe Tidy: it's chaos in lots of airports across Russia and in countries that fly to Russia I think it's being underreported actually because I just read this morning that there's 42 flights cancelled yesterday and more today but these are round trips so that means that there are double that number and if you look at some of the videos on social media there are huge queues of people that can't get on planes can't get information on the state service tasks
--:-- Joe Tidy: I was just reading that they've said that people are being urged to kind of keep away from airports because they're becoming overcrowded they can't do refunds, ticket machines aren't working.
--:-- Joe Tidy: And this has all come from a hacking group called Silent Crow, which said, we declare the successful completion of a prolonged and large scale operation, as a result of which the internal IT infrastructure of Aeroflot was completely compromised and destroyed.
--:-- Joe Tidy: So how common are attacks like this on Russia?
--:-- Joe Tidy: They are regular. Almost every week, I'm being told by different hacking groups about various things they've done to take down services and targets in Russia.
--:-- Joe Tidy: We often think about cyber attacks, particularly from a Western perspective, as being like, you know, perpetrated against the West by Russia.
--:-- Joe Tidy: But in terms of hacktivist attacks, which obviously have really come to the fore in the last few years since the full-scale invasion, it's the other way around.
--:-- Joe Tidy: Because you've got pro-Ukrainian hackers launching attacks against Russia.
--:-- Joe Tidy: You've got other hackers from different countries doing the same.
--:-- Joe Tidy: This group, Silent Crow, which had carried out the Aeroflot attack, they have teamed up with a group called Cyber Partisans, and they are a long-standing hacking group.
--:-- Joe Tidy: They describe themselves as a highly organised hacktivist collective that's fighting for the liberation of Belarus from dictatorial rule.
--:-- Joe Tidy: But of course, they're going against Russia as part of the kind of online allying ship between the two countries in terms of the attack on Ukraine.
--:-- Joe Tidy: Generally speaking, how vulnerable are airline IT systems?
--:-- Joe Tidy: We have heard a couple of attacks this year.
--:-- Joe Tidy: So for example, there was a criminal attack, which is obviously based around money.
--:-- Joe Tidy: This one today is not about money.
--:-- Joe Tidy: And that was against Qantas Airlines.
--:-- Joe Tidy: But there are almost regular attacks against the IT networks of airlines.
--:-- Joe Tidy: But it's really important to say these are attacks on the IT, not the OT.
--:-- Joe Tidy: And there is a difference.
--:-- Joe Tidy: OT is operational technology, IT is information technology.
--:-- Joe Tidy: So there's no real concern here that these planes are going to fall out of the sky or anything like this.
--:-- Joe Tidy: It's about the IT networks that underpin the running of these airlines.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: President Volodymyr Zelensky says Russia has ignored Donald Trump's latest peace ultimatum and pressed on with its bombing campaign, targeting more than 70 Ukrainian towns and villages.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: He said 22 people had died, including a pregnant woman at a hospital in a city on the Dnipro River.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: A prison facility in Zaporizhia was also hit.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Our defence correspondent Jonathan Beale reports from Kiev.
--:-- Jonathan Beale: President Zelensky says at least 22 people were killed across the country overnight in the latest Russian aerial assault on Ukraine's towns and cities.
--:-- Jonathan Beale: Most of the casualties were in a prison near the city of Zaporizhia, hit by Russian glide bombs.
--:-- Jonathan Beale: Ukraine's Ministry of Justice said 16 inmates were killed, with dozens more injured.
--:-- Jonathan Beale: Nearby housing was also damaged.
--:-- Jonathan Beale: The frontline region of Zaporizhia in the southeast is already partially occupied by Russian forces and is regularly targeted by Russian drones, missiles and bombs.
--:-- Jonathan Beale: Russia, like Ukraine, claims it only strikes military targets.
--:-- Jonathan Beale: But in Ukraine, civilians are often among the casualties of these nightly attacks.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: There's a new threat to an 81-year-old water treaty between the US and Mexico.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: It covers two major rivers, the Rio Grande and the Colorado River.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Under the treaty, every year Mexico sends to the US enough water to fill 170,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools and gets even more back.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: But northern Mexico is in the middle of a severe drought and it's led to the country falling behind on deliveries.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: The Trump administration has stepped in, threatening sanctions and more tariffs.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: The BBC's Will Grant reports.
--:-- Will Grant: After 30 consecutive months without rain the townsfolk of San Francisco de Conchos gather to plead for divine intervention
--:-- Will Grant: On the shores of Lake Toronto the reservoir behind Chihuahua State's most important dam called La Boquilla farmers on horseback and their families pray for a very wet rainy season
--:-- Will Grant: So far they've had no sign of one
--:-- Will Grant: From its high watermark The lake has lost 26.5 metres of depth.
--:-- Will Grant: It's now at less than 14% of its capacity.
--:-- Will Grant: In the congregation is Rafael Betance, who has monitored La Boquilla for the State Water Authority for 35 years.
--:-- Will Grant: Few know the lake's fluctuations as well as Mr Betance, and as we head out on the reservoir for a closer look, he says he's never seen the situation get this dire.
--:-- Will Grant: It's impossible. We are not able to water crops.
--:-- Will Grant: You can see that the dam lies idle.
--:-- Will Grant: There's no hydroelectric power being generated and we can't use any water for agriculture.
--:-- Will Grant: They're just decent enough.
--:-- Will Grant: Despite the meagre supply in Chihuahua, Mexico must abide by the terms of a 1944 water-sharing treaty with the United States.
--:-- Will Grant: Under the agreement, Mexico must send water from the Rio Grande to Texas.
--:-- Will Grant: In return, the US sends its own much larger allocation from the Colorado River to supply the Mexican border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali.
--:-- Will Grant: Mexico is in arrears and has been for much of the 21st century.
--:-- Will Grant: In April, on his Truth Social site, President Trump accused Mexico of stealing the water and threatened tariffs and maybe sanctions unless Mexico sends Texas what it owns.
--:-- Will Grant: The thing is, the complaints from Texas are valid, but people here on the Mexican side say you simply can't take from what isn't there.
--:-- Will Grant: People in these communities feel trapped by the terms of what they consider to be an outdated agreement, which doesn't account for the ravages of climate change.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: So this is my corn. It's about a week, 10 days off from being ready to harvest.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Brian Jones, a fourth generation farmer in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
--:-- Brian Jones: For the last three years I only been able to plant half my farm because I don have enough irrigation water
--:-- Brian Jones: We feel that Mexico has not been living up to their part of the treaty
--:-- Jackie Leonard: The cross arguments go beyond just water scarcity
--:-- Jackie Leonard: They're also about agricultural methods and efficiency.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: In the face of such a litany of problems, the community around the Rio Conchos can do little besides bow their heads and pray the rain falls sometime soon.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: That was Will Grant.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Still to come in this podcast Down there we have Sassuma Anna, the mother of the sea which is like a mythical figure in Greenlandic history or an Inuit tradition Greenland's Inuit majority taking pride in tradition but can they achieve independence?
--:-- Jackie Leonard: We'll be right back.
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--:-- Jackie Leonard: According to a nationwide survey conducted by GeneSight, nearly 9 in 10 Americans who've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety believe that mental health medications are somewhat or very effective.
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--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: It gives me insights and takes out some of the guesswork that can be associated with prescribing them.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: If you or someone you love is facing challenges with depression or anxiety, talk to your doctor about how genetic testing may help.
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--:-- Jackie Leonard: There's been another mass shooting in the United States.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: A gunman killed four people before shooting himself at a skyscraper in New York.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: This was Mayor Eric Adams' message to New Yorkers.
--:-- Eric Adams: No roads can describe this act of evil, a man who takes the lives of others who are innocent.
--:-- Eric Adams: And no roads can fill the void that has been left by this tragedy.
--:-- Eric Adams: Terrific crime reminds us all how easy it is to gain access to a gun.
--:-- Eric Adams: Gun violence has scarred so many neighbours and ripped apart too many families across this entire country.
--:-- Eric Adams: and we will continue the fight to do all we can to protect our city.
--:-- Eric Adams: But tonight we mourn for those who were killed.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Our correspondent in New York, John Sudworth, has been following the story.
--:-- John Sudworth: These reports started coming in at around 6.30 in the evening here in New York.
--:-- John Sudworth: Reports of a mass shooting at a skyscraper on Park Avenue in central Manhattan.
--:-- John Sudworth: A gunman seen striding into that building, carrying an M4 assault rifle at his side and then spraying bullets indiscriminately in the lobby, taking an elevator up to one of the upper floors and doing the same there.
--:-- John Sudworth: We've heard from the New York Mayor, Eric Adams, and the police commissioner at a press conference here confirming that five people were shot.
--:-- John Sudworth: Four of them have died, including one NYPD officer and another civilian, another worker in that building has been taken to hospital with critical injuries.
--:-- John Sudworth: John mass shootings are sadly a regular occurrence in the US but but rarely in Manhattan yeah that's right and I think that's why there's been such a sense of shock you know as news of this story has come in you know obviously Manhattan is one of the most sort of has the highest concentration of media organizations in the world so this is a city that is you know under very close scrutiny if you like but it is also in a state with some of the strictest gun laws in America.
--:-- John Sudworth: These kind of things thankfully are not common in this city.
--:-- John Sudworth: So I think that's part of the reason why there has been such a reaction.
--:-- John Sudworth: I mean of course at the end of last year we had the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Luigi Mancione who's facing trial for that similar sense of shock at the time.
--:-- John Sudworth: And of course the political dimension of that particular shooting gave that story such public interest.
--:-- John Sudworth: In this case the police say that the suspect who they've named as 27-year-old Shane Tamura from Las Vegas he drove by car all the way from Vegas crossing multiple states arriving in New York today.
--:-- John Sudworth: They say that he had a history of mental health problems.
--:-- John Sudworth: They are looking at motive.
--:-- John Sudworth: This skyscraper housed some pretty high-profile companies including the NFL for example.
--:-- John Sudworth: We don't know whether that's connected or whether it was chosen at random but obviously the police are going to be looking now very carefully to see if they can understand why this building was targeted in the way that it was.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: The five-day conflict between Thailand and Cambodia was the deadliest between them for more than a decade.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: At least 40 people were killed and more than 300,000 displaced.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: The ceasefire agreed on Monday appears to be holding, despite reports from Thai forces of attacks by Cambodian troops in at least five locations.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Some people have begun returning to their homes.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Others are waiting to see what happens.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I really wanted to return home but I dare not go now.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I'd rather wait until later today or tomorrow to see what the situation looks like.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I was listening to news on my phone last night in bed to hear if they stopped.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I didn't hear any gunfire after midnight so I started praying that they would permanently stop the fighting as agreed.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I want to go home.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I left all my things my house and my cattle.
--:-- Jonathan Head: Jonathan Head in Bangkok told us more.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I mean it was a very shaky start to the ceasefire and the Thais were clearly unhappy this morning.
--:-- Jonathan Head: Cambodia has denied that there were any skirmishes after midnight.
--:-- Jonathan Head: That delayed the seven o'clock meeting there was supposed to have between the commanders in each different area.
--:-- Jonathan Head: But eventually those meetings did take place we've had two actual meetings where cambodian and thai top officers sat opposite each other with a table between them and hammered out how they going to avoid fighting again and one online meeting they have agreed for the moment that there will be no more shooting there will be no more movements of troops attempted reinforcements of positions and that they will now start facilitating the return of any killed or injured soldiers but also to start looking at how they can get people back to their homes back from the evacuation centres.
--:-- Jonathan Head: And for that there needs to be an absolute assurance this isn't going to flare up again.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I think on the Thai side they're very jumpy because of the number of civilian casualties from Cambodian rockets.
--:-- Jonathan Head: And Donald Trump has warned Thai and Cambodian leaders that trade negotiations with the US won't progress if fighting continues.
--:-- Jonathan Head: Will that sort of thing focus minds?
--:-- Jonathan Head: Well I think it did.
--:-- Jonathan Head: In fact the Thai foreign minister has just acknowledged that their decision to attend the meeting in Malaysia on Monday was as a result of the conversation with Donald Trump on Saturday.
--:-- Jonathan Head: Now of course the ties aren't framing it as you know President Trump put a gun to our heads and we did it.
--:-- Jonathan Head: They're saying well we you know we explained to President Trump we are a very good partner of the US and we're committed to resolving things peacefully.
--:-- Jonathan Head: So we decided to attend.
--:-- Jonathan Head: I think it's very likely that both countries would have come to talks at some point this week because there was a lot of pressure from neighbouring countries in Malaysia but a lot of diplomatic efforts into getting the two sides together.
--:-- Jonathan Head: But the fact they came together so quickly and announced a ceasefire after just two hours of talks is almost certainly down to the pressure from President Trump.
--:-- Jonathan Head: They've got till Friday to get a deal on tariffs.
--:-- Jonathan Head: Both are now facing 36% tariffs.
--:-- Jonathan Head: If they don't have a deal that's much higher than neighbouring countries.
--:-- Jonathan Head: So that definitely played a part.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: For the first time in Colombia's history, a former president has been convicted of a criminal offence.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Alvaro Uribe, who was president from 2002 until 2010, was found guilty of witness tampering.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: He could now face up to 12 years in prison.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Here's our South America correspondent, Ioni Wells.
--:-- Ioni Wells: The charges at the centre of this trial date back to 2012 when Alvaro Uribe accused a left-wing senator of fabricating links between him and right-wing paramilitary groups involved in Colombia's armed conflict.
--:-- Ioni Wells: Uribe claimed that the senator was pressuring jailed fighters to testify against him but the Supreme Court dismissed his case and instead began investigating him.
--:-- Ioni Wells: They found evidence that him and his allies had tried to influence or bribe ex-paramilitaries who were in prison to change their testimonies and essentially retract statements linking him to those groups.
--:-- Ioni Wells: So he was accused of witness tampering which he's now been convicted of.
--:-- Ioni Wells: The paramilitary groups in question fought Marxist guerrillas like FARC often in extremely bloody battles in Colombia.
--:-- Ioni Wells: He's strongly denied all wrongdoing.
--:-- Ioni Wells: His sentence will be decided in a future court hearing but his defence is expected to appeal the conviction.
--:-- Ioni Wells: This ruling will likely have a strong political impact in Colombia.
--:-- Ioni Wells: He's widely seen as Colombia's most influential politician in the early 21st century.
--:-- Ioni Wells: His supporters credited him with leading this military crackdown against the Marxist rebels of the FARC eventually driving the insurgents to the negotiating table where they signed a peace treaty with the government in 2016 under his successor.
--:-- Ioni Wells: His critics though accuse him of being responsible for multiple human rights violations committed by the state by security forces as part of this crackdown on armed groups.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: After his initial house arrest in 2020 supporters rallied around him in Medellin but also critics were seen celebrating in the streets revealing these deep splits within Colombia itself.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Greenland has frequently been in the headlines since Donald Trump's return to power with his repeated threats to annex it from Denmark.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Greenland has a high level of autonomy but many in the majority Inuit ethnic group hope that one day it will be fully independent.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: But to do that the figures need to add up.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And at the moment it relies on big subsidies from the Danish government.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Bob Howard has been to the capital Nuuk to hear how people there might be able to self-fund their future.
--:-- Bob Howard: Down there we have Sasuma Anna the mother of the sea which is like a mythical figure in Greenlandic history or an Inuit tradition like the protector of the sea of the animals the hunting the weather survival everything.
--:-- Bob Howard: You know she's a really core figure in Inuit mythology.
--:-- Bob Howard: The indigenous Inuit people make up around 80% of the population living on the biggest island in the world.
--:-- Bob Howard: When earlier this year US President Donald Trump announced he wanted to buy or even annex Greenland the 55,000-plus people living here suddenly found themselves in the international spotlight.
--:-- Bob Howard: Living in harmony with the environment is critical as we heard poet Akhanoviana just say.
--:-- Bob Howard: Greenland has potential for the extraction of many minerals including so-called rare earth metals but there are currently only two active mines in operation.
--:-- Bob Howard: Thomas Varming the chief consultant and leader of the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland says there are many operational challenges when ice covers more than 80% of the land.
--:-- Bob Howard: Development is a bit hampered by the climate because you can most probably only work three months a year some places.
--:-- Bob Howard: And the longer time it takes before things get started well the longer time you have to wait for a cash flow to come in.
--:-- Bob Howard: And that basically also means that the investors have to be risk-taking.
--:-- Bob Howard: But then there are the restrictions the Greenlandic government has put on mining and the time it takes to secure various permissions to start extracting.
--:-- Bob Howard: Getting that permit for some is being compared to having your root canal at the dentist.
--:-- Bob Howard: It's a long haul to get that permit.
--:-- Bob Howard: The Greenlandic government is also involved in two legal cases with mining companies which have halted their work.
--:-- Bob Howard: Still the Minister for Business Trade and Raw Materials Naya Nathanielsen doesn't think that's putting investors off.
--:-- Bob Howard: She believes five new mines might be sustainable in the next five to ten years.
--:-- Bob Howard: In Greenland we do insist on doing things with a high ESG standard that is environment government and social standard and that adds to the bill.
--:-- Bob Howard: And that means that making profit in Greenland is probably more difficult than many other jurisdictions but we won't really lower our standards.
--:-- Bob Howard: So if the Western world wants a green transition they cannot get it as I see it on a discount.
--:-- Bob Howard: Another potential source of income is the tourist trade.
--:-- Bob Howard: Last year 160,000 people visited Greenland with more expected with direct flights from North America.
--:-- Bob Howard: Helena Stephenson is head of content and administration at Visit Greenland.
--:-- Helena Stephenson: Before that you had to go flying from North America over Greenland maybe to Iceland or Denmark and then back to Greenland.
--:-- Helena Stephenson: Now they can fly directly in high season.
--:-- Bob Howard: Minister Naya Nathanylsen says it will take time for the island where fishing generates 90% of export income to completely be able to stand on its own two feet.
--:-- Bob Howard: If you ask if I'm ready to declare full-on autonomy no because I have an obligation to the population of Greenland and we don't have a self-sufficient economy yet.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: And that's it from us for now but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: If you would like to comment on this edition or the topics covered in it do please send us an email the address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk
--:-- Jackie Leonard: You can also find us on X at BBC World Service just use the hashtag Global News Pod.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: This edition was mixed by Alison Purcell Davis.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: The producers were Carla Conti and Peter Hyatt.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Our editor is Karen Martin.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: I'm Jackie Leonard and until next time goodbye.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: This intersection where the world and America meet.
--:-- Jackie Leonard: Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
