Tourism, Poverty and Development

Andrew Holden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415566261
• eBook ISBN: 9781135175641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Poverty alleviation is high on the global policy agenda, its importance being emphasised by its place as the first of the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals. As a potentially significant source of economic growth in developing countries, tourism may also play a major role in poverty reduction and alleviation under the right circumstances. The incorporation of tourism into development policy and Poverty Reduction Strategies has special poignancy for those Least Developed Countries where natural resources exist to support a tourism industry and there are limited development alternatives.

This book offers a holistic, explicit and detailed introduction to the relationship of poverty and tourism within the context of developing countries. The book is divided into distinct sections, progressing from an evaluation of the key concepts of poverty, tourism and development; to the causal factors of poverty; to the mechanisms of how tourism is being implemented in policy and practice to reduce poverty and finally to an analysis of the relationship between tourism to poverty alleviation in the future. The adopted analytical approach of the key themes is multi-disciplinary, incorporating tourism studies, human geography, political economy, economics, development and environmental studies. It integrates examples and original case studies from varying geographical developing regions including Africa, South Asian and East Asia and the Pacific, to lend practical insights into tourism's role in poverty alleviation.

The text will be of particular interest to higher education students from tourism studies, geography, political economy, environmental and development studies, and sociology backgrounds. It will also be of relevance to government and policy makers, alongside those who have a more general interest in poverty alleviation.

Explaining and understanding poverty

This chapter:

• Critically evaluates the concept of poverty

• Identifies its relevance to individuals and global society

• Analyses its characteristics, definitions and multidimensionality

• Explores its spatial distribution

POVERTY AS A SOCIAL CONCERN

The term ‘poverty’ is embedded into the global vernacular and has relevance to people’s lives to varying intensities, from the removed luxury of a subject of dinner table debate to the actual suffering of those experiencing it. Poverty represents a political and moral challenge for society (MacPherson and Silburn, 1998) as is captured in the following statement from the Commission for Africa (2005: 13) with reference to Africa: ‘African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time. Poverty on such a scale demands a forceful response … The developed world has a moral duty – as well as a powerful motive of self-interest – to assist Africa.’ Similarly the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC, 2009: vii) suggests that: ‘tackling chronic poverty is the global priority of our generation’. One of the most cited poverty specialists, Professor Jeremy Sachs, estimates that 8 million people per annum die because they are too poor to stay alive (Sachs, 2005). Poverty is typically conceived as a negative state of being that threatens life and denies livelihood opportunities, a condition that people seek to evade and one for which there exists a moral imperative for the wealthier to help the ‘poor’ to escape from. It is likely that the majority of us would sympathise with Seabrook’s (2007: 35) description of someone as having a ‘distended stomach and discoloured hair of malnourishment, the skeletal figures lying listlessly while the flies encrust their eyes’ as being in chronic poverty.

This desire to alleviate poverty has been demonstrated through initiatives such as the Make Poverty History campaign run by several British charities and at a global level is embedded in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as shown in Box 1.1. These represent internationally agreed goals for a civil society amongst 150 Heads of States of the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, building on the outcomes of international conferences on development and poverty through the 1990s. Whilst there are eight goals, the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger is placed as the first goal as a statement of ambition. More specifically the actual target relating to this goal is to halve by 2015 the proportion of people whose income is less than US$1 per day compared to the figure for 1990. As will become apparent in the following chapters, the other seven goals can also be understood as having a direct relevance to poverty reduction, through providing security and opportunities to break free from the poverty trap in which hundreds of millions of people are currently caught.

BOX 1.1 THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Goal	Target
1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger	Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 per day
2) Achieve universal primary education	Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling
3) Promote gender inequality and empower women	Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015
4) Reduce child mortality	Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate
5) Improve maternal health	Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality rate
6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases	Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/Aids
7) Ensure environmental sustainability	Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources
	Halve by 2015, the proportion of people with sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
	By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum-dwellers
8) Develop a global partnership for development	Address the special needs of the least developed countries, landlocked countries and small island developing states
	Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system
	Deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt
	In cooperation with developing countries, develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth
	In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries
	In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications

Source: UNDP, 2003

The geographical distribution of poverty is typically associated with developing countries or the loosely applied term of the ‘South’, meaning the continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Yet, according to Lister (2004: 1), poverty is not just a problem of the ‘South’ but also of the ‘North’, a problem in developed countries as well as the developing, a perspective that is endorsed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF, 2000). Subsequently, to begin to be able to analyse and evaluate how tourism could be utilised for poverty reduction, it is essential to have a clearer understanding of how poverty has been interpreted and categorised. As Lines (2008) points out, before poverty can be confined to history it is necessary to understand the forces that create it and why poor people are indeed poor.

Whilst most people would profess sympathy with those in poverty, it is a highly complex concept and there is divided opinion about whether poverty is primarily concerned with a lack of monetary income or involves other factors such as social exclusion, marginalisation, vulnerability, political repression and victimisation. As will become evident in this chapter, poverty has been interpreted in various ways through the lens of political, economic, cultural, historic and cultural changes. The extent of recognising poverty as a ‘problem’ is influenced by moral judgement, religious conviction and political beliefs and the effects of its impacts on society. Several questions can be asked about poverty: Why should we be concerned about tackling poverty? What do we visualise and mean by poverty? Why do people end up in poverty? Who has responsibility for dealing with poverty? How can it be mitigated, reduced and alleviated? Is poverty geographically limited to developing countries? None of these questions have easy or straightforward answers, nor are there necessarily definitive ones.

The ethical and social concerns that poverty can raise are evident in the following two commentaries delivered over one hundred years apart. The first was written by Friedrich Engels in the middle of the nineteenth century, describing the living conditions of the proletariat in a rapidly urbanising Manchester in England, the first city in the world to develop as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Engels (1845: 100) comments:

If we briefly formulate the results of our wanderings, we must admit that 35000 working people of Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured by the contractor. In a word, we must confess that in the working men’s dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible, that in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable at home.

The social concern is evident in Engels’ description, as is a condition of poverty in which alongside physiological hardship rests a psychological denial of one’s rights as a human being and citizen. Whilst the conditions of the ‘working men’s dwellings’ have substantially improved in Manchester during the intervening period, over 130 years later Robert McNamara, the then president of the World Bank, made a speech in Nairobi in Kenya which launched the concept of ‘absolute poverty’, describing it as:

a condition of life so degraded by disease, illiteracy, malnutrition and squalor as to deny its victims basic human necessities … a condition of life so limited as to prevent realisation of the potential of the genes with which one is born; a condition of life so degrading as to insult human dignity – and yet a condition of life so common as to be the lot of some 40% of the peoples of the developing countries.

(McNamara, 1973, cited in George and Sabelli, 1994)

Ironically the absolute poverty that McNamara was describing has itself become a tourist attraction in Nairobi as is described in Box 1.2, lending a direct interaction to tourism with poverty in a controversial way that raises ethical and social issues over the appropriateness of this type of activity.

BOX 1.2 ‘SLUMMING IT: POVERTY TOURS COME TO NAIROBI’

Whilst Robert McNamara defined absolute poverty during his address in Nairobi in 1973, four decades later absolute poverty has itself become a tourist attraction in the city, raising issues of morality and ethics about the interaction between tourism and poverty. The title of this box is taken from an article by Rice (2009) in a newspaper about tour operators who have started selling guided tours through Kibera, one of the most deprived urban areas in Nairobi, located only a short drive from the luxury hotels where most foreign tourists stay. The tourists pay approximately US$35 for a tour that promises ‘a glimpse into the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people crammed into tiny rooms along dirt paths littered with excrement-filled plastic bags known as “flying toilets”’.

The described pattern of interaction offers potential benefits to the local community; for example, through philanthropic tourists giving donations to a local orphanage and buying handicrafts from a women’s craft shop, and at least one of the tour operators promises that the profits from tourism will stay in the local community. However, this kind of ‘philanthropic tourism’, whilst it may bring some benefits to the local residents, raises challenging questions about the ethical aspects of placing the poor in the shop window of wealthy tourists. One tourist from Egypt commented, ‘This made more of an impression on me than the pyramids of Giza’ – a statement that without further research to provide a richer understanding is open to varying interpretations. Key issues relate to whether this type of experience represents an ultimate form of voyeurism of the ‘tourist gaze’; can it be ‘right’ for poverty to be an attraction for tourists; the extent of the participation of the poor in the planning and development of this tourism; the degree of control by the poor in the operation of this tourism in their own ‘backyard’; and the contribution tourism is making to poverty reduction and opportunities for the poor in Kibera. Alongside the possibility of offering direct benefits to the poor, such as employment through tourism and improvement in the infrastructure of Kibera, secondary benefits may also be offered to the poor through the tourism supply chain. To this debate can be added the impact upon the tourist – if this type of tourism provides an educational and moving experience that encourages individuals to take further action when they return home to become active in poverty reduction, is that not a good thing? These questions do not have ready answers but demonstrate the complexity of the interaction between tourism and poverty when they come into direct contact with each other. They also illustrate the necessity for the poor to be involved in participatory mechanisms in tourism, to retain power, have their voice heard and influence its operation and development.

The two commentaries of Engels and McNamara on the conditions of poverty were based upon observations made over 100 years apart and in geographically distinct areas of the world. Yet they describe the characteristics of poverty that would be recognisable to most people. The two commentaries also illustrate that the conditions that create poverty can transcend time, geographies, cultures and economies. Inherent in both descriptions is the indignity that accompanies poverty, the physical discomforts that characterise it, and the denial of opportunities to realise one’s potential. The poverty of opportunity to realise one’s potential and improve livelihoods is illustrated through the personal circumstances of the life of Simon, a young man living in Uganda, in Box 1.3.

BOX 1.3 POVERTY OF OPPORTUNITY IN UGANDA

Simon is the eldest of eight children living in the village of Kumi situated in the north-east of Uganda. His father deserted the family in 2002 and his mother contracted HIV, stopping her working in the fields which resulted in reduced income and Simon having to take on the duties of running the household. Flooding in 2008 and severe drought a year later has left the family short of food and more urgently focused on procuring it by spending their very limited savings, resulting in an inability to save money to send the children to school. The area also experiences violent insurgencies which have compounded the poverty of this family, now lacking the capital to buy cattle to plough the land. Simon believes that the opportunity for education is the only way to help his family out of poverty. The local primary school was restored with money from Irish Aid but some of the children are hungry and their concentration is low. Headteacher Charles Akol comments: ‘You know a child is hungry because his mind is always on the mango tree in the yard. The moment the teacher is distracted, he will go out to the tree to pick a mango. Even if it is unripe, it is something to chew.’ The size of the largest classes is 202 students to one teacher, the children are often sharing one pen between two, and the school lacks electricity. Part of the problem is that teachers are paid very poorly, necessitating that they take jobs elsewhere, regularly taking time away from school to cultivate their crops, with sometimes there being just three teachers for a school of 867. Wanting the opportunity for her children to attend the school and gain an education, Simon’s mother says her anxieties about education overpower her concerns about food as her children can survive by eating only a small amount, but nothing can replace education.

The situation of Simon’s family illustrates the vulnerability of the poor to ‘shocks’ such as ill health, drought and insurgency. It also demonstrates how a family may fall into a poverty trap, where the harsh circumstances they experience mean their children cannot attend school, so condemning the next generation to limited opportunities and a probable life of poverty.

Source: after Gentleman, 2009

Real-life situations of poverty as portrayed in Uganda and Kenya illustrate the vulnerability of the poor to risks that are often beyond their control but that have significant negative impacts on their lives. Typical risks that have adverse effects upon the lives of the poor include natural disasters such as drought and floods; illness, epidemics and other health hazards; price falls in the world commodity markets for raw materials and agricultural produce; and war and civil unrest. It is also evident that poverty has different guises; for example, as an absolute poverty of not having sufficient to eat but also a poverty of opportunity for education and self-development. The somewhat amorphous boundaries of poverty raise further questions about it, including: How do we quantify the number of people living in poverty if it can take different forms? Is poverty a permanent condition for some societies, transcending the generations? If so, how can this poverty cycle be broken? What is the ethical duty of the economically ‘better-off’ to help the poor or should the poor help themselves? The ramifications of this question relate not only to the micro-level of individual responsibility but also to the macro-level of collective responsibilities; for example, where should the weight of responsibility for poverty alleviation lie: with individuals; the family; government charities and or non-governmental organisations (NGOs)?

Providing responses to these questions necessitates the consideration of pove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Explaining and understanding poverty
• 2 Tourism development: a relationship to poverty?
• 3 Geography of poverty
• 4 The global political economy and structural causes of poverty
• 5 Critiquing tourism and poverty reduction
• 6 A way forward
• Bibliography
• Index