In the Lavrentiya and Uelen settlements in the Chukotka Autonomous Area, the installation of long-awaited marine animal processing facilities is nearing completion—harsh Arctic weather has made adjustments to the plans of the construction team. By the end of November 2024, the Daurkin territorial neighbourhood community will have two modular buildings assembled from seven recycled 20-foot containers. Each has a domestic and technical area, a storage room with three freezer units and a production area with a smokehouse, blast chiller and other equipment.

The new workshops are expected to produce more than 50 tons of meat products, 5 tons of fat and up to 250 hides per year. The raw materials will be used to produce food for local residents, tailoring and art production. Local bone carvers are actively purchasing walrus tusk and bone, and there is a growing demand for traditional clothing in the area. Skins of bearded seals are used to make harnesses and belts, while walrus stomachs are for tambourines for traditional song and dance ensembles. According to Alexey Ottoy, Chairman of the Lorino territorial neighbourhood community, about 40 hunters in total work on the coast. They harvest walrus, seal, bearded seal, ringed seal and whale.

Funding for the construction of the new workshops was allocated within the framework of the 'Material and Technical Equipment of Sea-Hunting Industry' measure by the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East and Arctic. It is assumed that modern production facilities will allow marine hunters not only to preserve their traditional hunting but also to get additional means of livelihood—the labour market on the Chukotka coast is not very diverse. Seven years ago, the main source of income in 'national settlements' was the budget sector—schools, post office, housing and utilities, and others. The sea beast fishery, on the other hand, allowed them to survive but did not provide a tangible profit.

However, it cannot be said that this problem is specific only to modernity. For the Soviet leadership of Chukotka, the integration of the marine hunters into the socialist economy remained a headache for the entire time of the latter's existence. The authoritative ethnographer, Candidate of Historic Sciences Lyudmila Nikolaevna Khakhovskaya in her article 'Chukotka's Sea-Hunting Industry in Soviet Times: An Ethnographic Aspect' vividly shows how attempts to establish effective production on the coast of Chukotka time after time faced fundamental difficulties. Until the 1950s, the coastal sea hunter economy remained largely traditional and thus unstable. Fluctuations in animal populations, the limited availability of modern technical resources and other factors often brought the Chukchi and Inuit to the brink of starvation. At the same time, it was impossible to establish stable production—remaining collective farmers on paper, hunters managed their farms as they did hundreds of years ago, i.e. alone. Such an approach put an end, for example, to the use of modern ships, centralised supplies of ammunition for rifles and other benefits of industrial civilisation, without which there would be no abundance of food. For some time, there was even an opinion among the local leadership that local people should not be engaged in traditional crafts at all—food would be brought from the centre.

The problem was solved by state planning, which created an administrative incentive to organise hunters into brigades and, as a consequence, a basis for the introduction of modern technologies. Having gathered marine hunters into stable collectives, it was possible to give them motorboats, guns and other useful devices, which made it possible to increase the volume of sea beast extraction. The hunger had finally receded. However, after a while, another problem arose—the management could not find a stable market for the increased production capacity of Chukchi marine hunters. The fat, hides, bones and other products from the cutting of walruses and whales were simply disappearing, unclaimed by the economy, and little by little, a crisis of overproduction was forming. This significantly reduced labour motivation, and there was no way to generate demand. Moreover, in the late Soviet period, an obvious social imbalance of prestige emerged between the extraction and processing of the beast. The latter was specifically a work 'for women,' which most often had to be done with primitive tools—modern equipment never reached the Arctic. In the '80s, however, women were not willing to chew the skin with their teeth to soften it and left the profession. But, at the same time, the sea-hunting industry remained a core factor in the formation of ethnic identity, which conditioned its preservation in the 1990s, when the Soviet economy and its stimulation of the sea-hunting industry became a thing of the past.

In today's economy, support for the industry of marine hunters is primarily focused on maintaining the traditional way of life of coastal Chukchi and Inuit people. The sales market within the region so far corresponds to the production capacity of the fresh workshops, which should create a more or less sustainable development pattern for the coming years.

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