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Is Tourism the Most Destructive Enterprise?
Written by Elizabeth Becker, YaleGlobal
Wednesday, 24 April 2013
That's a lot for Tanah Lot
Tourism explodes with globalization, enriching lives but destroying
nature and culture
The world has serious concerns over fiscal crises, security crises and
environmental crises including climate change.
And then there are vacations. Yes, vacations - the getaways when we can
put aside lofty concerns and remember what living is all about: seeing friends,
hosting family reunions, discovering a new artist at a provincial festival and
running barefoot on the beach with salt air stinging our cheeks.
At least that was the definition of a vacation before globalization took
off.
Now vacations have joined the ranks of the biggest global industrial
complexes. While few noticed, travel and tourism grew into a giant business
sector and the world's largest employer - beating out health care, education
and retail. At least one out of every 11 people works in the industry,
according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.
Tourism contributes at least US$6.5 trillion to the world economy every
year. Since the 2008 recession, its growth rate has rebounded faster than
manufacturing and financial services. And if frequent-flyer miles were a
currency, they would be the most valuable in the world, even with all those
blackout dates.
It turns out that tourism is the poster child for how to benefit from the
global marketplace, for obvious reasons. Wholesale travel and tourism depends
on open borders. With political developments and technology - new long-distance
airliners that cross half of the globe in a single flight and the internet
revolution - countries off the beaten path in South America, Africa and the
Middle East are more accessible.
A chart of the rise of international tourist trips is a thumbnail history
of globalization.
The modern era of "Europe on five dollars a day" began in 1960. That year
25 million trips were taken across foreign borders. Ten years later the figure
rose to 250 million, a significant increase but not earth-shattering.
Then came globalization and the opening of borders. The end of the Cold
War in the early 1990s accomplished just that - opening long closed borders in
Eastern Europe and Asia, a wide swath of nations behind what used to be called
the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain. This newly opened territory
represented nearly one third of the planet, and by 1995, when most had opened
up to tourism, there were 536 million trips.
Last year, the 1 billion mark was broken with the UN World Tourism
Organization celebrating the event at its Madrid headquarters.
I dissect and explore this explosion of the tourism industry in
Overbooked. The elusive octopus-like industry is everywhere and nowhere.
Everyone takes vacations, but few see the industry behind them. Nowadays, any
endeavor can be transformed into a travel package.
Take medical tourism, for example. Countries like Malaysia have brought
together teams from their ministries of health and tourism to offer deals
including airline travel, medical procedures and resort-style recuperation in
the sun - all at a bargain-basement price compared to the health-care costs in
the US.
The religious pilgrimage is the oldest reason for travel, and today the
Hajj is the world's biggest travel event. Predominantly Muslim countries from
Bangladesh to Indonesia have powerful ministries of Hajj that broker precious
permission for citizens to travel to Saudi Arabia. The tourism industry has
transformed the center of the holy site in Mecca. Old rest houses and buildings
that once defined the traditional character of Mecca have been bulldozed and
replaced by luxury skyscraper hotels and condominiums, a shopping mall and a
clock tower that bears a striking resemblance to London's Big Ben.
So many billions of dollars are spent on the Hajj - the pilgrims spent
US$16.5 billion last year in Saudi Arabia - that corruption is a temptation. In
the middle of war, the Afghan minister of Hajj and pilgrimage fled the country
rather than face charges he embezzled US$700,000 in Hajj funds.
The impacts of tourism and travel on the environment, culture and society
are enormous. Hordes of day-trippers have transformed beautiful cities like
Venice, where 20 million tourists visit a town of 60,000. Rents have
skyrocketed as international chains compete for prime spots to capture the
tourist dollar, forcing out locals from apartments along with green grocers,
butchers and artisans. Venetian glass, paper and masks are now often made in
China or Eastern Europe. Several activist groups of Venetians decry their
politicians for failing to control the number of cruise ships or enforce
regulations that restrict the expansion of hotel rooms. Even UNESCO has warned
that Venice is as much danger of drowning from tourism as Aqua Alta.
The environmental costs can be high as well. Cruise ships, for instance,
are notorious polluters. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in
the course of one day, the average cruise ship produces: 21,000 gallons of
human sewage, one ton of solid waste garbage, 170,000 gallons of wastewater
from showers, sinks and laundry and 8,500 plastic bottles. Major cruise lines
are headquartered in the United States, but avoid major environmental
regulations, as well as many taxes, by registering and flagging their ships in
foreign countries.
Every traveler has a story about a favorite spot transformed by tourists
who leave chaos and waste in their wake and government officials who prefer to
count short-term benefits of allowing chock-a-block hotels over the long-term
costs of environmental degradation.
Not surprisingly, France and Costa Rica are two countries that understood
early on tourism's potential and the safeguards required to ensure that tourism
enhanced their communities and national treasuries. But few would have guessed
that Deng Xiaoping would be among tourism's early proponents. In late 1978, as
he was preparing to consolidate power in China, Deng gave five "direction
talks" on the central role tourism might play in China's reform movement.
For Deng, tourism was a natural to earn China much-needed foreign cash -
he predicted US$10 billion a year by the new millennium, and China reached that
goal in 1996. He viewed tourism as an effective way to flip negative
impressions of China. While he didn't use the phrase "public diplomacy," he set
into place a system to create a state-controlled tourism sector that includes
government-trained tourist guides extolling the joys of the open market and
China. Deng even calculated that if China brought tourism to Tibet it could
influence international opinion, ensuring that Tibet remained in China's orbit.
He also rightly warned that pollution from rapid industrialization could
despoil the beautiful spots that would attract tourists.
When first reporting on this stealth industry and its downsides in 2008,
I was accused of threatening everyone's right to travel. "Elitist" was the
milder of the epithets thrown my way. For the emerging middle class around the
world, travel is a right of passage. Travel is the reward for hard work and
proof that one has arrived. Yet every right comes with responsibility, and
protecting the world's beauties would seem obvious by demanding that the
industry respect local culture, heritage and the environment.
The destinations are in peril if the public, their governments and
international institutions don't study travel's impacts and find safeguards to
protect what's loved by all.
(Elizabeth Becker is a former New York Times correspondent and senior
foreign editor at National Public Radio. Her most recent book is Overbooked:
The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, Simon and Schuster. © 2013 Yale
Center for the Study of Globalization)
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