| Tourism as an Issue of Sustainability |
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| Saturday, 10 January 2009 | |
 In the late eighties while owning and operating a small event production business, I learned that Tourism in all its forms was predicted to become the world's number one economic sector by the new Millennium. Spurred on by the opportunity of being part of a growth market, I created and produced an annual conference for students of tourism and hospitality management called "Tourism 2000" which ran until 1999 with the concluding event - "World 2000 - the Millennium Marketplace."  During that period, Tourism did in fact take over the top spot, but what also happened was that gradually lecturers, industry leaders, and specialist speakers who presented their seminars, began to concern themselves less with the romantic illusion of travel as a sanitized mixture of a refreshing change of scenery, luxury, and tastes in food, drink and 'culture' and how to 'service' the clientele, and more with the effects created by huge numbers of people, largely indifferent to the problems caused in the local communities, economies and environment, moving into areas largely unprepared for the long range changes such a shift of resources would make. However, while researching this article I looked through the lists of topic titles presented over a ten year period, and not one included the word "sustainability." Chiefly, I think, because the drive towards more exotic locations was concentrated among tour operators and hotel developers and they were being given carte blanche by local governments desperate for the hard currency to pay off their trade deficits. Tourism was not on the platform at the Earth Summit in 1992 (nor is a separate issue in Johannesburg this year) but since 1999, The UN General Assembly has placed sustainable tourism development on the agenda of the Commission for Sustainable Development. Once we start looking at the industry from this perspective, the NGO sector of concerned communities and organisations become the ones who are challenging the prevailing notions implicit in the seminars I attended throughout the nineties. A quick example of this to make the point: people would discuss the potential growth of wildlife parks in East Africa and the colourful Masai tribespeople (most recently romanticised as background extras in the "Survivor 3 - Africa" television series) not knowing that whole tribes were being moved from their traditional nomadic lands in Tanzania to develop national parks for 'eco' tourism, thus limiting the grazing rights for the Masai's raison d'etre - their cattle, and, as only now we find, leading to a major decline in their numbers. One more quick example that speaks volumes: I saw reams of statistics about growth through South East Asia without any mention of the sex trade as a driving force. Today, tourism discussions involve many inter-related issues, for instance: The world mechanisms that are creating increasing disparity between rich and poor - (the usual source of labour in the hospitality industry) - and the position of workers in post-industrial society. The fact that as much as 90% of the production may be carried as family or small businesses competing with multinational chains or government supported enterprise. The definitions of culture that remain static (eg - in Japan that would be the Geisha, temples, Suma wrestling, sushi, zen gardens, kimonas, tea ceremonies, paper screens, tatami mats and politeness in public) rather than the dynamic culture (resentment of foreigners, high pressure at work, authoritarian family structures, reduction of living - and - recreational space, americanisation of movies, fashion, food and advertising, and increasing suicide rates). |
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