Earlier this year 250 Filipinos were evicted from their homes. Their lakeshore village of Ambulong was attacked by hundreds of police, who demolished 24 houses. Many people were reported wounded. Cesar Arellano, of a Filipino human rights organisation, said: “The people are not leaving — they have set up camp. They are going to fight for their land.”
The intention of the authorities was to clear people to make way for a major business venture — not oil, logging or mining, but ecotourism, which is growing massively around the world and is now backed by governments, world bodies and international banks. The United Nations has declared 2002 the year of ecotourism, and last month a world summit was held in Canada to consider the problems and potential for the fastest-growing sector of the world’s largest industry.
According to many conservationists and tour operators, this “benign” version of tourism offers a way to fund environmental protection, stimulate the incomes of the poor and encourage cultural exchange. Ecotourists are thought to spend considerably more than mass tourists, and for debt-strapped developing countries, having people visit, look at things that require minimal investment and pay lots of money for the privilege, can seem like manna from heaven.
Nature is a money-spinner. Ecuador earns more than $100-million a year from 60000 visitors to the Galapagos and Kenya as much income from its safari holidays. While ecotourism run by indigenous communities can be a lifesaver in areas where other income sources are being depleted, all too often these very people are being left out of the ecotourism development plans. The dispossession of people from their land is increasingly associated with ecotourism.
The cases are widespread. In the Moulvibaza district of Bangladesh more than 1000 families of the Khasi and Garoare indigenous groups face eviction from their ancestral lands for the development of a 610ha eco-park. “We have been living here for hundreds of years … we will not leave this forest,” said a Khasi headman, Anil Yang Yung, in a public demonstration in Dhaka in February.
In Brazil two fishing villages near the coastal resort town of Fortaleza are fighting for their land. In one, Tatajuba, recently voted one of the world’s top 10 beach sites by the Washington Post, a village of 150 families has gone to court to try to show that a real estate agency illegally took possession of the publicly protected land where they live. A company wants to build a 5000ha “ecological resort catering for 1500 tourists” in their place.
In Prainha do Canto Verde, a village of 1100 families, the community is defending itself against speculators who, they say, bought beach land deceptively from fishing families and then registered the land for clearance. “It wasn’t illegal, but the fishing families can’t read and didn’t know what was happening,” says Rene Schaerer, a United States public policy adviser working with the community.
Governments in developing countries, keen to modernise, often say that “primitive” subsistence activities are incompatible with conservation. These were the arguments given to evict the Masai in East Africa and the Bushmen of Botswana, but the reality is that many indigenous and other poor communities are living on prime areas of ecotourism real estate and speculators want the land.
Much ecotourism development comes as part of “development packages” funded by international banks. The Asian Development Bank is funding a $1,2-billion scheme in South-East Asia, which includes an ecotourism development that may affect many hill tribes. And the World Bank is funding an eco-park in India’s Karnataka state that involves a land rights dispute with indigenous communities.
“There are many cases in Indonesia where whole communities have been evicted … driven out, beaten up and their possessions destroyed or looted — to clear land for tourist developments,” says Sean Foley, a development consultant who worked in Indonesia during the Eighties and Nineties.
The likelihood of mass evictions in Asia are “absurd”, says Warren Evans, director of environment and social safeguards division at the Asian Development Bank. “We are looking at ecotourism as a part of rural development, poverty alleviation and to strengthen conservation. Any activity the [bank] is supporting has to follow our safeguard policies on environment, indigenous peoples and involuntary resettlement.”
Few poor communities are set against ecotourism, but they almost all want to be able to control it. “We were about to start community ecotourism on our lands, as Bushmen in Namibia have done,” said a Khwe Bushman in Botswana. “But then the intimidation, torture and evictions started again. The government did not want to lose tourism business to us.”
An international indigenous people’s forum on tourism held in April in Mexico found feelings running high, says Deborah McLaren, a Native American with the Rethinking Tourism Project, an international network of indige-nous peoples campaigning on tourism. “Communities are being oppressed. Governments and industry have corrupted the whole idea of ecotourism, and it is proving just as destructive as any other industry. But somehow no one wants to hear that.”