DEVELOPMENT: Tourism Can Tackle Poverty

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BERLIN, Mar 15 2004 (IPS) - The World Tourism Organisation is urging multilateral development assistance agencies to recognise tourism as an important instrument to tackle poverty.

“Tourism can be harnessed as a significant force for the alleviation of poverty as well as for environmental protection, giving economic value to cultural heritage, creating employment and generating foreign exchange earnings,” says the organisation’s secretary-general Francesco Frangialli.

In a report released at the world tourism fair ITB in Berlin on Monday, the United Nations’ specialised tourism agency also urged the World Bank, regional development banks and the European Union to “provide specific assistance for tourism to LDCs (least developed countries) and other developing countries with poor communities”

The report argues that multilateral development assistance agencies can have considerable leverage with governments of developing countries.

“Before providing assistance they should ensure that national and local tourism strategies and policies that address poverty issues are in place. Individual projects assisted should be required to meet criteria that ensure benefit to the poor,” Frangialli told IPS.

Governments have a key role to play in providing the right conditions for a successful tourism industry that delivers benefits to the poor, says the World Tourism Organisation abbreviated as WTO-OMT, the second part referring to its name in French to distinguish itself from the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The global tourism agency’s report urges developing country governments to include tourism in strategies and action programmes on poverty reduction and ensure that tourism negotiations in the WTO framework contribute to sustainable development.

The rationale behind the WTO-OMT’s plea is that tourism is a key component of many countries’ service exports and it has the power to deliver significant international earnings that can be directed towards “the fundamental world priority of alleviating poverty”.

According to WTO-OMT, global tourism arrivals grew by 54 percent during the 12-year period between 1990 and 2002, and now stand at about 700 million. By 2020 the figure is expected to swell to more than 1,400 million.

Africa and South Asia which harbour many of the world’s poorest countries are expected to achieve growth rates of four to five percent each year.

The study points out that global earnings from international tourism amounted to 475 billion dollars in 2002.

Tourism makes up a large part of the world’s growing service sector and accounts for over 30 percent of all service exports. In some countries such as some in sub-Saharan Africa, tourism accounts for as much as 55 percent of service sector exports.

Frangialli said the WTO-OMT had launched a campaign for underlining the significance of tourism in realising the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The two main thrusts of the MDGs to be achieved by the year 2015 are to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day and to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

The MDGs were agreed at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.

Among the actions launched by the World Trade Organisation is the ‘Tourism Enriches’ campaign triggered at the First World Conference on Tourism Communications (TOURCOM) end of January in Madrid.

The initiative came from the WTO-OMT members last year and was discussed at the 15th Session of the General Assembly in Beijing, China, last October.

The TOURCOM Network of Communications Experts, a new consultative body to the World Trade Organisation’s Press and Communications Section, will be responsible for implementing the campaign within the scope of their own activities around the world.

The UN specialised tourism agency is also promoting the concept of sustainable tourism and establishing a special initiative on poverty (ST-EP), an acronym for ‘Sustainable Tourism – Eliminating Poverty.

The programme was launched last year in collaboration with UNCTAD, the UN Conference on Trade and Development that focuses on the world’s poorest countries.

ST-EP aims to encourage sustainable tourism – social, economic and ecological – which specifically alleviates poverty, bringing development and jobs to people living on less than a dollar a day. It targets the world’s poorest countries, particularly in Africa and the developing world in general.

At ITB Berlin that ends on Tuesday, ST-EP has initiated a joint effort to collaborate with DANTE, the Development Assistance Network for Tourism Enhancement. DANTE is a research initiative led by George Washington University’s International Institute of Tourism Studies (IITS).

In collaboration with several partners, DANTE has developed a database of ongoing worldwide tourism development projects amounting to over 9 billion dollars in development assistance funds from 26 different development agencies.

“Through systematic and applied research we aim to become a leading global partnership that promotes sustainable development tourism initiatives with development assistance resources,” says DANTE’s project manager Shaun Mann.