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INTaP, International Network for the promotion of Tourism against Poverty, originally
was jointly launched (in 2004) by the UFMG at Belo Horizonte and the University of Siena, with the support of the Regional Government of Tuscany and the State Government of the Minas Gerais, together with Italian trade associations. However, there are around many initiatives, institutions and individuals that seem to share the same inspiration. The project of a Network aims at contributing to promote coordination and exchange.
We have to look at tourism from the point of view of economic development, and in particular in the light of the processes of continental integration, ongoing parallel and partially competing-complementing the so called process of globalization. We have to look at:
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the uneven development across
countries (the so called convergence issue);
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uneven distribution of the gains from integration, across continents as well as across regional economies within the national states;
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the effects of geographic and economic concentration related with local increasing returns to scale;
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the increasing eschewdness in the personal distribution of income.
As growth (with its expected benefits) has become more and more unevenly distributed both geographically and socially, we have to ask ourselves: do we really have to learn live with it? Is it the necessary result of integration and globalization?
Tourism: times, they are changing.
In many countries, in the first world but also in many of the late-coming and emergent economies, we are still in that phase of development where faster growth goes along with increasing environmental degradation and hence with the deterioration of the quality of life. This increases the demand for escape tourism,
while at the same time generating the means to pay for it, at least in some
portion of the population.
It is a new tourism with a new tourist that is appearing in increasingly big ''hoards'':
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there is an increase of leisure, non culturally motivated
tourism;
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there is an increasing flow of tourists out of the
traditional destination of tourism;
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these tourists go toward new and newer
''exotic destinations'', and they are insatiably hungry for new destinations;
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there is a spreading habit of considering destination characteristics as irrelevant, provided they provide that escape people are looking for (hence the increase in last minute, last second deals etc.);
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there is a fundamental change in habits, off-work days or holidays are being spread over a portfolio of shorter
holidays;
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there is an increasing awareness of the broadening choice set of tourism destinations, in terms of prices and not just of availability.
Tourism has been declared as the prime income generating, employment creating activity of the third millennium, what is the reality:
is tourism a means to fight poverty? If yes, under what conditions?
Here, enters the story of poverty and what we should or could do about it calling on the tourists' help.
Sustainable tourism(s) on the two sides of the pond: a new alliance?
To talk about sustainability, we have to look at tourism as an economic activity involving the multiple exchanges between
two communities, the community of the tourists and the community of the hosts. Sustainability of tourism is basically a human
relationship.
Tourism development marries with sustainability: tourism dedicated resources are naturally of the depletable type, and they can be maintained only by means of watchful and appropriate policies.
More than anything else, tourism is local development in the narrowest sense of the word.
We need to launch a new alliance: the first world has to enter into a pact to share more equally the proceeds of the exploitation (now tourist as before were sugar cane or metal ores) of the LDC' resources.
For each euro spent by a European tourist in America Latina, only between 50 and 60 cents stay
locally, the rest returning back to first world countries as profits of hotels and facilities operated by foreign firms, salaries to directors and other qualified employees and the like.
We are alleviating poverty by contributing only about half of what we would be giving to an advanced country.
It can also immediately create (or deepen) social inequality where it did not exist, with the related displacement costs.
INTaP
By increasing absolute and relative poverty, tourism can be working against peace and social cohesion.
INTAP is a small attempt to give an answer, an initiative within the possibilities of Universities, research centres, local governments, which can act as catalytic for an alliance of institutions, both public and private, to develop a way of attacking such problems. They can design and develop a variety of actions, along basic principles, inspired by the idea that, tourism being local development, the community has to be protagonist.
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The local community is the best custodian and administrator of its own patrimony of inherited resources.
Not any tourist is better than no tourist; more tourists do not necessarily mean more income and wealth.
Buy (and sell) turismo a kilo, as the Brazilians know: pricing for what you are really consuming and using up (as a replacement costs), which induces the participation of the tourist with the community's effort for the appropriate and efficient administration of community’s common and private resources.
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Fair distribution of the gains out of the exploitation of local resources: this is a challenge, the frontier post of tourism promotion, against poverty in absolute terms and against the relative poverty that to an extent is a problem shared as by the North and the South of the world.
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