RESOURCES • LIFE’S RESOURCES & THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

TOURISM IN THE PHILIPPINES: A VIEW FROM THE UNDERSIDE

An Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism and Peace for Life Consultation

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2008 OCTOBER 21-23 | QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES

 

REPORT

Tourism in the Philippines: A View from the Underside

An Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism Consultation

By VIVIAN DE LIMA, Peace for Life Secretariat

 

This article presents an overview of the context and outcomes of the Consultation which took place on 21-22 October 2008 at the BLVDM Ecumenical Center, Quezon City, Philippines

Revisiting ECOT’s Birthplace

Very few would associate ECOT with the Philippines, and fewer still would remember that it was here twenty-eight years ago that an ecumenical advocacy group on alternative, socially responsible tourism—in what would become ECOT—was conceived. The country was then in social ferment, and the ecumenical movement was in its militant best. The 1980 International Workshop on World Tourism held in Manila (sponsored by the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA) and the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences) became a landmark in providing a critical analysis of mass tourism and in introducing the idea of ‘alternative tourism’ (where the phrase was first used in that context). It was in fact designed as the churches’ response to the World Trade Organisation’s Manila Conference on Tourism held the same year.

For better or for worse, tourism (like the ecumenical movement) has travelled a long way since then. It can even be claimed that the 21st century is characterised by developing countries on the offensive of out-hyping each other in offering their respective paradises as the ultimate destination for the pleasure/ adventure seeking tourists with foreign currency to spare.

So perhaps, the time for remembering has come, for revisiting the context that made necessary the establishment of ECOT within its ecumenical roots, within the framework of social justice and ecological sustainability. And where else but in the Philippines would the most appropriate place be, where the ecumenical movement and faith-based institutions have kept close links with the bigger movement for social justice?

Peace for Life (PfL), an international group with a secretariat based in the Philippines, was ECOT’s main partner in the consultation and served as the host. PfL, a fairly recent formation established by progressives within the ecumenical movement in response to the US-led ‘war on terror’ and its twin hegemonic project referred to as globalisation, has for its main thrust building solidarity among people of different faiths and convictions in resistance to empire and all its attendant schemes that debase people and the integrity of creation. To prepare, coordinate, and implement the plans for the consultation, PfL formed a working group from representatives of the identified cooperating agencies composed by the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, IBON Foundation, and CONTAK Philippines.

Social Justice and Human Rights
and the Integrity of Creation as the Main Issues

Despite the seeming disparity in ECOT’s and PfL’s focal areas, it isn’t very much so on closer scrutiny. With the integration of the entire world into a global economy within the rubric of unregulated capitalism, the boundaries that used to define areas and sectors of organisational concerns have become more fluid. All man-made problems that plague humankind are so interrelated that advocates addressing specific problems would find their programmes the richer and more relevant for getting involved with other advocacies. Thus it was deemed that this new collaboration could offer an opportunity to widen analyses of issues and provide added perspective for the enrichment of PfL’s and ECOT’s advocacies.

This would be particularly relevant given the growing popular consciousness on critical issues like climate change; depletion of fossil fuels and mineral resources and the attendant race for control of what remains of these; food and water shortages; erosion of cultural-social bonds and ethic identities; religious extremism; and the obscene distribution of wealth, income, and power, all of which would have more than mere tangential relevance to PfL’s and ECOT’s objectives.

Current discourse on tourism puts it among the most essential activities and the simplest route for poor countries to provide employment, for communities to benefit from direct North- South income transfer. Charged with politically-correct terminologies—sustainability, corporate social responsibility, peacebuilding, community-based ecotourism—the push for tourism development is being presented as the ultimate solution to some of the world’s biggest problems, poverty among them.

In direct language, this translates into pressuring governments to open up service industries to unrestricted access by multinational big businesses and minimal domestic supervision. Under GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) and TRIMs (Trade-Related Investment Measures) services, including utilities will need to be opened up to international capital.

Arguably, there are areas where resident communities have reaped considerable financial benefits, even windfall, from mass tourism. This explains why many local governments and certain communities are enthusiastic about transforming their little known islands and exotic hideaways into tourist hubs.

Tourism, however, is much more complex than most economic activities in the way it touches so many aspects of life, and in a way it can affect, perhaps irreversibly, environment, resource allocation, people, social structures and ethos. Tourism is big business with colonial roots, and it maintains the same unequal trading relationships, dependencies, and division of labour that characterise global capitalism, with the added dimension of overtly commodifying everything—natural resources and ecosystems, national patrimony, cultural heritage—for short-term gains.

A big predicament that faces the socially concerned is the certainty that mass tourism, sustainable or not, is here to stay and is bound to get even bigger and widespread at least in the next several decades. So much is at stake in allowing multinational big business and capital-subservient governments to have a free hand into tourism development. Education, vigilance and activism are still the best weapons there are.

Philippines: A Classic Case of Tourism in the Third World

Like most governments of the world’s non-industrialised economies that subscribe to the idea that integration with the global economy through privatisation and liberalisation is the only way for a country to develop, the Arroyo government puts a premium on tourism to generate income and employment for the Philippines’ ever expanding population. The Department of Tourism (DOT) reports that 3.09 million tourists in 2007 resulted in total receipts of US$4.9 billion (about four per cent of the country’s GDP), a growth of 8.7 percent over the previous year and ranking sixth among the most visited of the ASEAN member countries. The target for 2008 is US$5.8 billion.

On 11 June 2008 the Philippine Senate passed the Tourism Act of 2008 “declaring a national policy for tourism as an engine of investment, employment, growth and national development.” The idea is to cash in on the “booming global industry” and play catch-up with the regions leading destinations, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Elaborate safeguards and assurances for residents of prospective development areas notwithstanding, organised communities and organisations are sceptical, even fearful, of the effect of massive tourism development on the livelihood of people and on the environment. From experience, the opening up of certain spots as tourist havens have resulted in displacements with attendant loss of livelihood; the reclassification of agricultural lands for land reform into golf courses; banishment of fisherfolk from their traditional fishing grounds; indigenous population dispossessed of ancestral lands in favour of ecotourism.

There is also the ever growing concern that tourism brings with it sexual trafficking of children. Studies have shown that the Philippines ranks fourth among nine nations with most children in prostitution—estimated to be between 60,000 to 100,000.

Medical tourism, a recent project of the Department of Health, is another area which is getting a lot of criticism from groups within the social justice movement. The Council of Health and Development, a non-government community health programme, considers the focus on medical tourism as “a sell-out of the country’s health care system to foreign big business that spells government abandonment of its responsibility to provide much needed health services to the people.”

The Two-Day Consultation

Despite all these problems, there is, admittedly, no Philippine group specifically focused on the tourism industry in the country. Neither has tourism been among the urgent issues of people’s organisations and NGOs. Thus, the idea of a tourism-focused Philippine consultation received enthusiastic responses from grassroots organisations and issue-based NGOs whose current concerns were being affected by tourism as it has been practiced and in all likelihood would be threatened further with the implementation of the Philippine Tourism Act of 2008.

It was agreed that the consultation would have the following objectives: • Present a comprehensive analysis of global tourism within the framework of social and environmental justice; • Identify focal areas for advocacy and activism and lay the groundwork for further initiatives; • Analyse the Philippine Tourism Act of 2008 and identify areas and methods of intervention; • Come up with a plan to develop solidarity tourism in the Philippines as part of Philippine participating groups’ advocacy and education activities; and • Identify areas of cooperation between ECOT and the participating organizations.

The consultation presentations were by sectoral representation: women, children, indigenous peoples, environment activists, cultural workers and artists, health practitioners, and church workers (both Roman Catholics and Protestants).

Reflections, Analyses, Testimonies

Caesar D’Mello, ECOT’s executive director, gave a thoughtful retrospective of ECOT’s beginnings and an overview of international tourism’s contemporary scene. He bewailed the fact that “[the] concerns identified with the tourism footprint twenty five years ago and today are strikingly similar, but worse today,” a frightening prospect given that “estimates of leisure travellers is set for a continuous rise, heading in the not too distant future for a figure of around a billion travellers a year.”

IBON, a research-education-information development institution, considers it unlikely that tourism, for a country like the Philippines, could result in stable economic progress. It could only offer short-term panacea in the form of dollar receipts.

From the moral view point, Everett Mendoza, an academic and theologian, finds tourism “a parable of the exploitation and abuse of subject people”.

Juline Dulnuan, a professor from the University of the Philippines- Asian Institute of Tourism, presented the result of the study she made on the impact of tourism as perceived by the residents of Sagada, Mountain Province. The Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), where Sagada is, has been identified as priority area for the county’s ecotourism development, citing “nature” and “culture” as the region’s two main tourism assets.

A new specialised segment of the tourism market attracting investments from countries with aging populations is the retirees’ haven aimed at attracting retired people and their pensions. As these ‘havens’ are meant to villages complete with recreational facilities, entire communities have to be displaced and deprived of their already meagre livelihood. Agricultural lands are reclassified and converted into golf courses and traditional fishing grounds converted and reserved for recreational activities.

Another new area that has become highly controversial is the country’s push to develop medical tourism. So far earning some $350M in 2007 alone, hopes are high that it could get at least $1B over the next five years. Ironically, the public health service is on a steep decline. Five out of ten Filipinos die without getting any medical attention, only 30% of the population has full access to essential drugs, top 10 causes of mortality and morbidity are mostly communicable and preventable diseases and the list can go on. For the Council for Health and Development, medical tourism is “a sell-out of the country’s health care system to foreign big business, a government abandoning a primary responsibility of providing much needed health services to the people.”

The Philippine Tourism Act

One of the major issues for discussion was the Senate Bill 2213 or the Philippine Tourism Act of 2008. It envisages a tourism policy that “will promote a focused, sustainable, responsible and participative culture of tourism that is ecologically and culturally sensitive, economically viable, and ethically and socially equitable for local communities.”

Bobby Tuazon, a presenter from the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, concludes that the Tourism Act of 2008 is ill-equipped in addressing glaring and pressing historical social, economic, cultural, and environmental costs that far outweigh the possible marginal gains.

The participants commented and argued on the unlikelihood that the Act could achieve what it said it would. One of the biggest weaknesses identified was that the proponents of the bill failed to consult the basic stakeholders: the workers, local business entrepreneurs, and the communities in the targeted areas. Nelson Mallari from an Aeta Community in the Central Luzon, testified on the effect of the now operative National Tourism Master Plan (1991-2001, the Medium Term Philippine Development Plan (2000-2004), (2004-2010) on their community, and how they had long been struggling against these laws and policies, which nobody bothered to explain to them, but had resulted in even greater marginalisation of their indigenous community: restriction of movement, destruction of their way of life, displacement, land-grabbing, and disrespect for their legal right to self-determination. He expressed even greater fear for his community’s survival with the implementation of the Tourism Act of 2008.

The Concerned Artists of the Philippines fiercely criticised the Act. Development of a “culture of tourism” as codified is meant supposedly to promote national pride and preserve indigenous culture, but effectively, it is packaging Philippine culture for the consumption of tourists and nurtures a “culture” in the service of tourism, the result of which is that people have become alienated from their own indigenous cultures’ ethos.

Unity Statement

After two days of presentations, discussions and workshops, the participants gave the verdict that “the dire economic and social conditions of the people today are caused by, among other reasons, decades of development aggression, a part of which is so-called ‘tourism development”.

Around 35 individuals from the following organisations participated: ACCE-Philippines; Center for People Empowerment in Governance; Center for Women Resource; Children Rehabilitation Center; Health Alliance for Democracy; Indigenous Peoples Rights Monitor; Center for Environmental Concerns-Phils.; Council for Health and Development; Concerned Artists of the Philippines; CONTAK Philippines; IBON Foundation; Iglesia Filipina Independiente; INPEACE-Mindanao; Kairos Philippines; Kalikasan-PNE; Kasimbayan; National Council of Churches in the Philippines; KMU-Glowhrain; Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement; Southern Tagalog People’s Resource Center; SALINLAHI; UP- Asian Institute of Tourism; United Church of Christ in the Philippines; United Methodist Church; UMC/ ECLOF Phils; WJPIC-Religious of the Good Shepherd; and Peace for Life.

This article was published in ECOT’s newsletter, Contours, Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2008, which features other papers presented at the consultation.

 

Related articles:

• Unity Statement: Tourism in the Philippines: A View from the Underside
• News: Tourism is part of development aggression, says consultation (Asia Pacific Ecumenical News, 17 Nov 2008)
• News: PfL, ECOT, Philippine groups probe impacts of global tourism (27 Oct 2008)
• The problem with tourism (The Manila Times, 24 Oct 2008)