Kulusuk (Denmark) (AFP)

"Ready to do business, not for sale": Greenland authorities on Friday recalled that their island, rich in natural resources, was not for sale after revelations in the US press that Donald Trump was interested in the purchase of the huge Danish autonomous territory.

The day before, the business daily The Wall Street Journal had written that the American president, a real estate mogul before embarking on politics, had "shown himself several times interested in the purchase" of this territory which counts some 56,000 residents and spoke to his White House advisers.

The president has learned about the natural resources and the geopolitical importance of the region, according to the newspaper.

"Greenland is rich in precious resources (...) We are ready to do business, not to sell" the territory, said Friday the Greenlandic Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Twitter.

In Kulusuk, a village of hunters and fishermen populated by less than 300 inhabitants in the south-west of the island, the inhabitants met by AFP do not believe in Donald Trump's project: "it will never happen!" says Jakob Ipsen, the owner of one of the two accommodations in the village.

"People take this as a big joke, they tried it in 1867, then during the Second World War and nothing happened, it certainly does not happen again," he says, polar black on the barred back of the Greenland flag.

Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953, when it entered the Danish "Kingdom Community". In 1979, the island obtained the status of "autonomous territory", but its economy still depends heavily on the subsidies paid by Copenhagen.

Joined Friday by the agency, the cabinet of the Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in Copenhagen did not wish to make comments in the immediate future.

"It must be an April fool", tweeted the former head of the Danish government Lars Løkke Rasmussen (Liberal Party).

- Melting ice -

Greenland is a gigantic Arctic island, as big as France four times, rich in natural resources (oil, gas, gold, diamond, uranium, zinc, lead).

The northernmost military base in the United States - Thule Air Base - is still on the island.

"This is the military position of Greenland" that would attract the US President, said Jakob Ipsen.

During the conversation, the 50-year-old recalls however that "when Kulusuk was at its peak, about 2,000 people were living here and most of them were American".

Isolated by ice a good part of the year, this region of Greenland was colonized late by the missionaries, invaded by "the white man a little more than a century ago", recall the natives.

Today, what worries Kulusuk as much as the rest of the island is global warming. This immense territory is on the front line of the melting Arctic ice, a region that is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet: it has increased four-fold between 2003 and 2013.

The melting of the Greenland icecap (the ice sheet) is responsible for 25% of the rise in the sea level.

If it were to disappear completely, the territory would contain enough ice to raise the ocean level by seven meters.

For its part, since its election in 2016, President Trump, a well-known climate scientist, has notably removed the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and has systematically sought to unravel the environmental regulations adopted during the eight-year presidency of the United States. his predecessor Democrat Barack Obama.

© 2019 AFP