UNEP's Global Civil Society Forum -Seventh Session
Regional preparatory meetings October/ November 2005

Water Is A Human Right – Not To Be Compromised By Tourism!
Experiences from Kerala, India

According to the World Tourism Organization (WTO-OMT), sustainable tourism should make optimal use of environmental resources that constitute a key element in tourism development, maintaining essential ecological processes and helping to conserve natural heritage and biodiversity. Sustainable tourism should also provide socio-economic benefits that are fairly distributed, and should contribute to poverty alleviation.

This definition includes that tourism should be support the poorest sections of society -people who suffer from lack of access to sufficient nutrition, health care, education, clean drinking water and basic sanitation. With the Millennium Development Goals, the international community has pledged to reduce the proportion of people living on less than one US-Dollar a day and to reducing the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water to half the 1990 level by 2015. Ensuring access to safe drinking water is an integral part of the fight against poverty.

Does tourism support this goal in the way it should? In the South Indian state of Kerala, which is being promoted as one of the "must see" destinations in the world, the record of tourism has been very poor in this regard. In fact, in many areas tourism has been highly counterproductive, polluting the environment and compromising people’s access to clean water. The scope for local self governments to effectively address the problems related to tourism is being reduced by inadequate industry-biased state legislation.

The Houseboat Menace in the Kerala Backwaters

in Kainakary near Alappuzha, a region famous for its backwater tourism, the increasing number of tourist houseboats has led to significant water pollution. Local people, who depend on the lake, river and canal water for their daily water requirements, complain that the water has become polluted and has got a kerosene taste from the houseboat engines. "Even the fish tastes of kerosene", they told us. The local panchayat president has called for government regulation. The carrying capacity of the region has clearly been exceeded, resulting in a decline in biodiversity and loss of fish stock. Tourism may be only one of the "culprits" contributing to water pollution, but it has in recent years become a major problem.

Water Theme Parks: Who Benefits?

"Who really benefits from tourism?" tourism NGOs asked at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004. As far as big water theme parks in South India are concerned, the answer is clear: they are catering to domestic tourists from the growing and increasingly affluent middle and upper class. The water theme park Veegaland near Ernakulam was opened in 2000 and reached its break-even point within three years. While investors and tourists definitely benefit, local people only see the flipside of the tourism coin. The park consumes huge amounts of water, a public resource privatised by the industry for the sake of profit making. The park advertises the hygienic conditions inside the park, while discharging chemically treated water into the surroundings. Local people complain that polluted water from the park has adversely affected their agriculture and that the chemicals from the discharged water are the cause of skin irritation. At the same time, they do not get any benefit from the park, as the management, by policy, does not employ local people. Efforts by the local panchayat (local self-government) to collect the entertainment tax due from the park according to the Kerala Local Authorities Entertainment Tax Act (1961) have so far been in vain, effectively stripping the panchayat of its possibilities to improve local infrastructure and the quality of life for local people. Due Privatisation of a vital Common Resource at Kovalam Beach in the South of Kerala, tourism has led to severe water scarcity in the area. Especially in the peak season, the demand from the hotels and restaurants leads to groundwater depletion, affecting local communities whose purchasing power is far below that of the tourism industry and the tourists. The high consumption of a common good by the tourism industry is an illegal form of water privatisation.

In response to a petition, the High Court of Kerala directed that water should not be extracted for commercial purposes. The large amounts of waste and sewage generated by tourism have also become a major environmental problem, even affecting tourism as such. The haphazard growth of tourism in Kovalam without proper planning took place to the detriment of local people, many of whom do not benefit from tourism. In response to this problem, the Kerala state government introduced a new legislation called Kerala Tourism Act 2005 which is suggesting new tourism zones in any tourist destination in the state. This legislation infringes the power of local self-governments, effectively denying the local population adequate space in tourism planning and implementation.

The Tourism Challenge

For tourism to actually benefit the poor and to avoid jeopardising vital natural resources such as water, governments need to ensure integrated planning with the participation of the local population, observing both the natural and social carrying capacity of the areas where tourism takes place. Limits to the growth of tourism must be identified and enforced before damages occur which may be irreversible (such as loss of species). Where damages have already occurred, governments should enforce industry regulation and take appropriate measures to prevent further harm to the environment.

Governments must introduce and effectively enforce adequate laws and regulations, safeguarding the rights of local people and self-governments. The polluter pays principle must be applied, but that alone is not sufficient. It must also be ensured that the basic needs of the local population are met (and are not compromised for the sake of tourism), that their rights are fully respected and that the environment is not adversely affected to the detriment of local communities. Observing laws and regulations constitutes a minimum requirement that the tourism industry must meet. For tourism to become sustainable, however, corporate social and environmental responsibility (including the responsibility of small and medium-size enterprises) must go beyond that.

Governments and the tourism industry must ensure adequate and informed participation of local people, in terms of both decision-making and benefit sharing in tourism (including the option for local people to say no to tourism if necessary).

[This position paper has been prepared by Christina Kamp and Sumesh Mangalassery for "KABANI ¬The other direction", a small and young NGO that promotes community¬based tourism in Wayanad, Kerala/India, and raises awareness on the impacts of tourism, with a view to contributing to change in the current tourism scenario. EED¬Tourism Watch, Bonn/Germany, has supported the research on tourism and water that forms the basis of this position paper.]

KABANI ¬The other direction
Further information: www.kabani.org
E¬mail: kabanitour@yahoo.com
October 2005