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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TOURISM:
RECONSTRUCTING NEW VISTAS FOR THE TOURIST GAZE -- Vasuki Nesiah In the wake of the Tsunami, even as thousands around him were still grappling with its devastating impact on their lives, former German chancellor Helmet Kohl was airlifted from the roof of his holiday resort in Southern Sri Lanka by the Sri Lankan air force. Having come to Sri Lanka for luxury spa treatment in a coastal hotel, Kohl is, of course, the most elite of tourists and his privileges are not representative of all tourists - but that aerial exit from debris and disaster is symptomatic of the tourist industries' alienation from the local community. The ease of his flight away from the devastation when official relief supplies were still to reach the majority of victims was an early indicator of how tsunami relief was to interface with the tourism industry. Kohl was barely airborne, and the waves barely receding when plans were already afoot to ensure that the beaches of Sri Lanka were cleared of fisher folk and rendered pristine for the tourist gaze. The 'native' predicament - naturalized vulnerability There has been much cynical speculation already that global attention regarding the tsunami's impact was heightened by the fact that tourists were amongst the victims. The media was certainly riveted by tsunami escape interviews with "western" tourists in Indian ocean departure lounges - first rate, first person accounts with first world tourists. Just as complex social conflicts are glossed as 'primordial tribalism'/ 'the natives are always fighting', we are familiar with CNN snapshots of 'natives' being overwhelmed by natural disasters awaiting international humanitarian relief and rescue interventions. With the geopolitics of race and economics, the echoes of colonialism and the specter of empire, distinctions between us and them, metropole and periphery, some parts of the globe are just scripted into tragedy and chaos; metropolitan television screens are accustomed to their loss, their displacement, their overwhelming misery. Against this backdrop, the tsunami experiences of tourists overwhelmed by a natural disaster provides a more newsworthy break from stories that simply echo yesterday's news reports about locals caught up in floods in Bangladesh and storms in Haiti. The real story here is how that overwhelming impact, the acute structural vulnerability (of countries like Sri Lanka, Haiti or Bangladesh) to natural disasters is itself naturalized. Location in the trajectory of the tsunami waves is a given but there is nothing 'natural' about location in the global socio-political landscape that determines the extent of 'exposure', (or the extent of 'risk' to borrow a disciplinary conceit of economics), to adverse impact from such natural disasters. The political economy of exposure to natural disaster is disastrous but not natural. The iconic trope of tourism as the production of 'exotic' destinations
through contrast and comparison is part of what produces that exposure,
that vulnerability, as 'natural'; it is simply the 'native' predicament
in locales like Sri Lanka. One of the principle drives behind western
tourism to the global south is predicated on that 'native' difference.
It is the quest for a departure from the everyday of western suburbia
in a neatly packaged module that still insulates the visitor from
the risks of Sri Lanka's 'native' predicament. Trafficking in that
balance of otherness and insulation is the task of the tour masters.
The Tsunami penetrated that insulation to some degree. However,
even through the bloodletting of the last two decades, tourists
visiting Sri Lanka have been remarkably insulated from it all -
the civil war, but also its socio-economic predicament. In fact,
in the cartography of the tourist imagination Sri Lanka figures
as an adventure zone whose attraction lies at least partly in factors
central to its socio-economic predicament - a predicament that results
in discount holidays, but also embeds it in an itinerary of consumer
friendly 'otherness', i.e., cheap holidays from the everyday that
make it a low cost listing in a travel catalog of consumable difference. But does the tourist industry simply feed-off a preexisting socio-economic predicament, perhaps even mitigate impoverishment - or does it exacerbate and entrench Sri Lanka in that itinerary of peripheral economies served up for the industry's consumption? Having being airlifted from the Southern coast, Helmet Kohl announced that in choosing to stay on in a luxury hotel in Colombo he was placing a vote for tourism and, that that, in turn, was an expression of his commitment to Sri Lanka - thus tourist consumption in itself becomes an expression of solidarity, a measure of humanitarian relief. Kohl is not alone in advancing that slippage between the tourist industry and humanitarian relief. The government, the World Bank and the donor community has also been pressing that slip in advocating for massive subsidies to the tourism industry as a prime engine of tsunami relief. Perhaps its too much to expect that any of these actors would see the tsunami impact as a lesson underscoring Marx's edict that we need to replace "the domination of circumstances and chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances". OK - so the World Bank didn't stop to refer to their well thumbed copy of the German Ideology before making its tsunami relief prescriptions. But at the least we would expect them to be a bit more shy about seeing the tsunami as an opportunity to replace 'the domination of the tourism industry over coastal communities' with even more 'domination of the tourism industry over coastal communities' The argument is not that 'tourism' is bad for Sri Lanka and can be captured simply through an analysis of orientalist travel, exploitative economic relations, metropolitan domination etc. Clearly the broader tradition of 'tourism' and international travel has had a mixed, complex history. For the many who came, surfed, littered, took photographs, bought sex, Batiks shirts and Barefoot sarongs and left, there are others who ended up engaged by solidarities that were not overdetermined by the structures and ideologies that fueled the tourism industry. Even the interface with colonial exploration was double-edged - As Kumari Jayewardene and others have shown us, we have always had a line of itinerant travelers who washed onto our shore as' tourists' of one sort or another, only to develop more fundamental commitments to local communities; commitments that then fed into, or even helped catalyze, traditions of dissent and struggles for justice that have had enormous reach in our collective histories. Let's return however to the relationship between the dominant thrust of the tourism industry and Lanka's socio-economic predicament. As noted before there is much in SL's economic straits that benefits tourism. At a macro level, tourism can have its benefits in being a significant source for revenue, employment and infrastructure development. It also has a range of spread effects since tourism generates demand in many sectors; every job created in the tourism industry is said to result in almost ten jobs in other industries - with enhanced demand in areas like agriculture and small industries, a whole spectrum of service sector employment etc. i.e., the kind of thing that excites Central Bank policy wonks and whoever profits from those Batik shirts and Barefoot sarongs, and, dare we say it, the beneficiaries of extra demand for higher paid sex work and other informal sector labor. At a micro level the jobs generated by the industry have enabled some financial autonomy for some sections of the working poor - and this even when pay and working conditions are exploitative - it is an autonomy that may have particular significance for women and other groups who may yield less financial decision making power in the 'old' economy. Yet this baby came with a lot of muddy bath water even before the tsunamis washed in. The growth it has generated has often been unbalanced growth that enhanced financial vulnerability with little accountability to local communities. Thus as we discovered through the shifting fortunes of the ceasefire, the post-911 drop in international travel, recessions in other parts of the world etc., communities that work in the tourism industry have a heightened dependence on a fickle, fluctuating transnational market. The majority of the jobs it creates in the formal sector are service sector jobs that are exploitative, badly paid, seasonal, and insecure; factors that are reproduced many times over in the tourism industry's large informal sector in areas that range from prostitution to handicrafts. Its untrammeled exploitation of the coast has created unsustainable demands on the local environment that have impacted particularly badly on coastal ecology. Equally perniciously, it has systematically transformed more and more public use land such as beaches into private goods that fence out the local community. The tragedy is that many of these negative developments may be exacerbated with the tsunami reconstruction plans. From Thailand to Sri Lanka, the tourist industry saw the Tsunami through dollar signs. The governments concerned were onboard from the outset. Massive subsidies to the tourism industry are planned in ways that suggest the most adverse distributive impact. MONLAR has warned that many of the UNP cum World Bank proposals for liberalization will now be revived and pushed through with little public dialogue and debate given the emergency powers the government has given itself under cover of tsunami relief and reconstruction. Infrastructure development will be even further skewed to cater to the industry rather than to the needs of local communities. The proposals on the table call for the building of multi-lane highways and the whole scale displacement of entire villages from the coast in the name of humanitarian reconstruction The current tilt of 'humanitarian' reconstruction plans are roadmaps for multi-national hotel chains, telecom companies and the like to cater to the tourism industry. Small-scale fishing operations by individual proprietors will become more difficult as access to the beach becomes increasingly privatized and fishing conglomerates move in. The environmental deregulation proposed in the Sri Lankan PRSP will open the door to even more untrammeled exploitation of natural resources. None of these reconstruction plans, many of them done in the name of the communities they will disenfranchise, is being channeled through decision-making processes that are accountable or participatory. Ultimately it looks like reconstruction will be determined by the deadly combination of a rapacious private sector and government graft - human tragedy becomes a commercial opportunity opportunity, tsunami aid a business venture . Not unpredictably, even the subsidies planned for the tourism industry in the wake of the tsunami are going to the hotel proprietors and big tour operators - not to the porters and cleaning women who were casual employees in hotels. Neither proporietors not local residents, we have heard that many of them, now unemployed, are not even classified as tsunami affected so they are denied even the meager compensation that they should be entitled to . The situation is much worse for the vast informal sector of sex workers, souvenir sellers etc. whose livelihood depended on the tourism industry. If the Tsunami highlighted the acute vulnerability that accompanies financial dependence on the industry, the Tsunami reconstruction plans look set to exacerbate this even further. In a needs assessment study conducted by the Bank (in collaboration with ADB and JAICA) they evaluated the loss borne by the tourism industry as amounting to $300 million. This stands in contrast to the $90 million that the fishing industry is said to have suffered. The ideological grammar embedded in an assessment methodology that places a hotel bed bringing in $200. a night as a greater loss than a fisherman bringing in $50 a month has far reaching consequences for the post-tsunami dispensation. With reconstruction measures predicated on this accounting of loss we are on a trajectory that exponentially empowers the tourism industry to be an even more powerful player than it was in the past, and, concomitantly, one that exponentially disempowers and further marginalizes the coastal poor. Travel and displacement Much has been made of the unsightly fishing shanties that will not be rebuilt. Instead fishing communities are going to be moved to even more unsightly urban squalor with plans for limiting their spread and crowding them into apartment complexes like the sardines they may fish. However, this will be further inland. As they sit on the beach watching the ocean loll onto Lanka's shore, tourists will enjoy the coast in a sanitized 'consumer friendly' environment. Ironically, they may be even sitting in cadjan cabanas that evoke a nostalgic ode to the cadjan homes of fishing communities of the past - a romance with a neatly consumable experience of 'otherness' without the interference of a more messy everyday. But perhaps this is the new everyday that is proposed - the teaming
hordes in designated settlements, but outside that squalor zone
will be a playground for the mercantile imagination - the imagination
of tourist industry fat cats who will be raking in the Tsunami windfall.
With the building of the much talked of super highways, tourists
become better positioned to zoom from airport to beach, shopping
mall to spa while the communities who lived in these region will
become less mobile as they are shut out from entire stretches of
coastal land. If tourism is about privileged displacement, the crossing
of boundaries for recreation and adventure, here it is tied to the
forced displacement of fishing communities, and the instituting
of new boundaries that exclude and dispossess. |