Tunnelling under the Atlantic
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With a population of just over 50,000 people the Faroe Islands are spending vast sums of money digging sub-sea tunnels to keep remote communities alive. Combined with a government subsidised helicopter service, it allows islands with a handful of permanent inhabitants to thrive and has helped reverse the trend for young Faroe Islanders to emigrate in search of a more modern lifestyle.
Join Tim Ecott, author of The Land of Maybe: a Faroe Islands Year, as he flies over this remote North Atlantic archipelago and ventures deep beneath the ocean to investigate why big spending on infrastructure brings huge social benefits to the islands.
Presenter / producer: Tim Ecott Image: Faroe Islands; Credit: Tim Ecott / BBC
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Food Chain is the podcast that explores the world's relationship with food and what it takes to put food on our plates. |
| 0:09.0 | The Food Chain from the BBC World Service. Available now. |
| 0:15.2 | I'm Tim Eckhart and that noise you can hear is the sound of the engines of the helicopter I'm travelling on, |
| 0:21.8 | which is operated by Atlantic Airways, the National Airline, of the Faroe Islands. |
| 0:27.2 | There are 17 inhabited islands stretching across the North Atlantic, about 220 nautical miles, |
| 0:33.9 | northwest of Shetland. Join me on my journey around the islands |
| 0:37.5 | as I explore how the pharaohs maintain communications |
| 0:41.5 | and invest in infrastructure to keep small communities alive. |
| 0:49.8 | Those are the sounds of the engine of the helicopter. |
| 0:52.4 | We're just taking off from Klaxiswick, heading north to actually the most northerly island of the pharaohs, |
| 0:59.2 | which is called Fugloy, which means the Bird Island. |
| 1:03.9 | So we're just waiting for the captain, Hans Erich, to make his departure announcement. |
| 1:11.6 | Yeah, hello again, and very very welcome on board this Atlantic Airways helicopter flight to Cluxwick. |
| 1:18.9 | We will take off, and we wish you a pleasant flight. Thank you. |
| 1:24.6 | The Faroe Islands are an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Denmark contributes |
| 1:30.6 | around 3% of GDP to the islands in the form of a grant frozen at 88 million euros. |
| 1:37.3 | The 54,000 islanders earn most of their income from fishing, which contributes about 20% of GDP. Unemployment is less than 1% |
| 1:47.4 | and living standards are high, as is life expectancy. But for many years, Faro's experienced |
| 1:53.5 | a net loss of younger islanders who moved abroad for a more modern lifestyle. Investing in communications |
| 1:59.6 | and infrastructure is now part of the government's |
| 2:02.2 | strategy to reverse this, as Prime Minister Barra Astoy Nielsen explains. |
| 2:07.5 | I do not think it's the task of the government to decide where people live or not, but the |
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