Tourism As An Instrument Of Poverty Alleviation?

NGOs Are Not So Sure!

By adopting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the international community has placed poverty reduction at the top of the political agenda. By 2015, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty is to be halved. The World Tourism Organization (WTO-OMT), recently upgraded to a specialised UN agency, has also taken up the cause of poverty alleviation. Whether tourism can play a meaningful role in achieving this goal remains an open question. NGOs have voiced their doubts.

A panel discussion in Germany, organised by DANTE as part of the international seminar "Tourism: Unfair Practices – Equitable Options“ on 8th December in Hanover, reinforced their scepticism. About 40 representatives of NGOs and tourism initiatives from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the USA got a clear reply from TUI’s director of environmental management, Wolf Michael Iwand, to the question "Why should the tourism industry have an interest in poverty alleviation?".

For such an interest is obviously non-existent. "The business of business is business", said Mr. Iwand. TUI therefore did not write poverty alleviation into their objectives. On the contrary: Tourism is based on inequality. “And we are living comfortably with it”, he admitted. “People in the destinations are asking: Send us more!”

Adama Bah from Gambia Tourism Concern emphasised that the question was much more complex. “Yes, people will say “Bring us more tourists!”. But do they have a choice? No!". In many developing countries it was not a question of whether you wanted more tourists or not, but whether you had a choice.

K.T. Suresh from Equations (Bangalore/India) stressed that at Equations he did not meet those people who said “send us more!”, but that he did in fact hear people who say "enough!". “We just live in two different worlds.” At a time when there had been a debate of more than ten years, injustice was becoming more and more pervasive. “It is not acceptable that inequality is something we should profit from”, was K.T. Suresh’s strong reaction from an Indian NGO perspective.

Unlike the tourism industry, the German government does regard poverty reduction as one of its goals, confirmed Burghard Rauschelbach, senior advisor at the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ). About one hundred of GTZ’s current development projects had to do with tourism, some of which include public private partnerships. "If there was not the illusion of tourism as an income generating activity, we would have no justification", said Mr. Rauschelbach.

For Tricia Barnett from Tourism Concern (London), jobs as such are not sufficient. She stressed the often exploitative working conditions in tourism, including long working hours and job insecurity. The high dependency on tips and service charges must also be seen as problematic. In times of crisis, people became dependent on wages that are too poor. There are international conventions such as human rights conventions and labour conventions, “but governments don't care and operators don't care”.

Mr. Iwand objected: “Compliance is essential for big companies”. But according to the experiences of several seminar participants, e.g. from India and Peru, laws and regulations are being changed to suit tourism companies (such as TUI) in order to lure them into these countries. The companies then find it easy to comply with these - rather low - standards. However: “It’s news for me that all big companies are following the laws in all countries”, K.T. Suresh said.

“Is a bad job worse than no job?”, asked moderator Jürgen Hanefeld, NDR. A resolute “yes” was the answer given by Patrick Dalban Moreynas from the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers Associations (IUF/UITA/UIL). "We are strongly against saying that bad jobs are better than no jobs. Otherwise it is a race to the bottom. It is better to have no job than a bad job because the alternative is a good job! That’s why we say, yes, fight poverty by creating employment, but by creating good jobs!”

René Schärer from the Brazilian Instituto Terramar expressed his doubts about the World Tourism Organization’s approach to poverty reduction. “The WTO exaggerated a bit, after not having done much”, he said. And recommended: "Stop talking about poverty elimination. Call it a wealth redistribution programme or something else. It might help a little, but there is still much to do.” Mr. Schärer looked back to his own experiences with attempts to transfer expensive land from the poor to the rich: “If we had not been able to strengthen community organisation in Prainha do Canto Verde, land would have gone to a real estate agent, tourist bungalows would have been build, fishermen would have lost access to the beach and their livelihoods."

Carlos Maldonado from the International Labour Organization (ILO) pointed out that communities in Latin America took very different approaches to tourism. "Some communities don't want any tourism, because they consider it a threat. Some communities say it could be interesting under certain conditions. It depends on the context. We have the best and the worst examples. Some countries are making the same mistakes and experience the same difficulties as others.”

Not only are the experiences with tourism rather diverse. So are people, so are the structural reasons for poverty, emphasised K.T. Suresh. And the responses must therefore also be different. “There is a long way to go until tourism can contribute to the reduction of poverty.”

Five Tourism Events at the World Social Forum

One step on this long way will be the World Social Forum (WSF) that will be taking place in Mumbai/India from 16th to 21st January, 2004. The panel discussion and the seminar in Hanover were organised by FernWeh – Tourism Review (Freiburg) and the NGO Network for Sustainable Tourism Development (DANTE) in preparation for the World Social Forum. The WSF in Mumbai will be the fourth one to take place, but will be the first one at which tourism issues will be highlighted in a comprehensive way. An “Intercontinental Dialogue on Tourism” will be organised as one out of 27 panels at WSF, with a capacity of 4,000 participants. It is scheduled to take place on 19th January 2004 from 9.00 to 12.00 a.m. In addition, four workshops will be held, with a capacity of 200 participants each.

The organising committee includes Equations (Bangalore), the Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism (ECOT, Hongkong) and EED-TOURISM WATCH (Bonn/Germany), supported by NGOs from 19 countries that participated in the preparatory seminar in Hanover. The WSF interventions will provide opportunities to voice criticism as well as to present positive examples which show that “Another World is Possible” and necessary, also in tourism!

The International Seminar was sponsored by the European Commission.

18th, Dec. 2003