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Ecotourism in Mexico
The study of ecotourism offers many opportunities to reflect on the importance of sustainability, and the possibilities of implementing approaches which move us in a new direction. But it also suggests that there are significant obstacles. Overcoming these obstacles requires more than well-intentioned policies; it requires a new correlation of social forces, a move towards broad-based democratic participation in all aspects of life, within each country and in the concert of nations. Strategies to face these challenges must respond to the dual challenges of insulating these communities from further encroachment and assuring their viability.
The obstacles are an integral part of the world system, a system of increasing duality, polarized between the rich and poor --nations, regions, communities, and individuals. A small number of nations dominate the global power structure, guiding production and determining welfare levels. The remaining nations compete among themselves to offer lucrative conditions that will entice the corporate and financial powers to locate within their boundaries. Similarly, regions and communities within nations engage in self-destructive forms of bargaining --compromising the welfare of their workers and the building of their own infrastructure-- in an attempt to outbid each other for the fruits of global growth. The regions unable to attract investment suffer the ignoble fate of losers in a permanent economic olympics, condemned to oblivion on the world stage, their populations doomed to marginality and permanent poverty.
Sustainability is not possible as long as the expansion of capital enlarges the ranks of the poor and impedes their access to the resources needed for mere survival. Capitalism no longer needs growing armies of unemployed to ensure low wages, nor need it control vast areas to secure regular access to the raw materials and primary products for its productive machine; these inputs are now assured by new institutional arrangements that modified social and productive structures to fit the needs of capital. At present, however, great excesses are generated, excesses that impoverish people and ravage their regions. Profound changes are required to facilitate a strategy of sustainable development: in the last section we explore such an approach, suggesting that ecotourist development strategies may contribute to promoting a new form of dualism: a dual structure that allows people to rebuild their rural societies, produce goods and services in a sustainable fashion while expanding the environmental stewardship services they have always provided.
Research shows that when given the chance and access to resources, the poor are more likely than other groups to engage in direct actions to protect and improve the environment. From this perspective, an alternative development model requires new ways to encourage the direct participation of peasant and indigenous communities in a program of job creation in rural areas to increase incomes and improve living standards. By proposing policies that encourage and safeguard rural producers in their efforts to become once again a vibrant and viable social and productive force, this essay proposes to contribute to an awareness of the deliberate steps needed to promote sustainability.
Ecotourism is widely believed to be the perfect economic activity to promote both sustainability and development. In this essay we examine the relationship between these two goals and end up with some reflections on the organization of specific projects.
In the ultimate analysis, we rediscover that in present conditions, the very accumulation of wealth creates poverty. While the poor often survive in scandalous conditions and are forced to contribute to further degradation, they do so because they know no alternatives. Even in the poorest of countries, social chasms not only prevent resources from being used to ameliorate their situation, but actually compound the damage by forcing people from their communities and denying them the opportunities to devise their own solutions. For this reason, the search for sustainability involves a dual strategy: on the one hand, it must involve an unleashing of the bonds that restrain people from strengthening their own organizations, or creating new ones, to use their relatively meager resources to search for an alternative and autonomous resolution to their problems. On the other hand, a sustainable development strategy must contribute to the forging of a new social pact, cemented in the recognition that the eradication of poverty and the democratic incorporation of the disenfranchised into a more diverse productive structure are essential.
Sustainability, then, is about the struggle for diversity in all its dimensions. International campaigns to conserve germplasm, to protect endangered species, and to create reserves of the biosphere are multiplying in reaction to the mounting offensive, while communities and their hard pressed members struggle against powerful external forces to defend their individuality, their rights and ability to survive while trying to provide for their brethren. The concern for biodiversity, in its broadest sense, encompasses not only threatened flora and fauna, but also the survivability of these human communities, as stewards of the natural environment and as producers. Internationalization has stymied this movement towards diversity. The powerful economic groups that shape the world economy (transnational corporations and financial institutions, and influential local powers, among others) are striving to break down these individual or regional traits, molding us into more homogenous and tractable social groups. They would position us to support the existing structure of inequality and to engage in productive employment; and, for those lucky enough to enjoy high enough incomes, to become customers.
Food self-sufficiency is a controversial objective that cogently raises the question of autonomy. Although development practitioners are virtually unanimous in rejecting calls for extreme specialization, there is general agreement on two contradictory factors in the debate:
1) local production of basic commodities that can be produced equally well but more efficiently elsewhere is a luxury few societies can afford, if and only if the resources not dedicated to the production of these traded goods can find productive employment elsewhere; and
2) there are probably few exceptions to the observation that greater local production of such commodities contributes to higher nutritional standards and better health indices. In the context of today's societies, in which inequality is the rule and the forces discriminating against the rural poor legion, a greater degree of autonomy in the provision of the material basis for an adequate standard of living is likely to be an important part of any program of regional sustainability. It will contribute to creating more productive jobs and an interest in better stewardship over natural resources.
There are many parts of the world in which such a strategy would be a wasteful luxury. It would divert resources from other uses that could better contribute to improving well-being. But even when the importation of basic needs is advisable, people concerned with sustainable development raise questions about modifying local diets so that they are more attuned to the productive possibilities of their regions; in the current scene, the tendency to substitute imported products for traditional foods is having terrible consequences for human welfare in many societies.(2)
Food self-sufficiency, however, is only part of a broader strategy of productive diversification whose tenets are very much a part of the sustainability movement. Historically, rural denizens never have been 'just' farmers, or anything else, for that matter. Rather, rural communities were characterized by the diversity of the productive activities in which they engaged to assure their subsistence. It was only the aberration of transferring models of large-scale commercial agriculture to development thinking in the Third World that misled many into ignoring the multifaceted nature of traditional rural productive systems. Sustainable development strategies directly face this problem, attempting to reintroduce this diversity, as they grapple with problems of appropriate scales of operation and product mix.
Sustainable development, however, is not an approach that will be accepted, simply because "its time has come." In the final analysis, it involves a political struggle for control over the productive apparatus. It requires a redefinition of not only what and how we produce but also of who will be allowed produce and for what ends. For organizations involved in projects of sustainable development in rural areas, the conflict will center around control of mechanisms of local political and economic power, and the use of resources. The struggle to assure a greater voice in the process for peasants, indigenous populations, women, and other underprivileged minorities, will not assure that their decisions will lead to sustainable development. But broad-based democratic participation is the best way create the basis for a more equitable distribution of wealth, one of the first prerequisites for forging a strategy of sustainable development.
But these marginal rural producers offer an important promise: they can support themselves and make important contributions to the rest of society. Present policies are driving peasants from their traditional activities and communities. (Barkin, Batt and DeWalt 1991) Peasants and indigenous communities must receive support to continue living and producing in their own regions. Even by the strictest criteria of neoclassical economics, this approach should not be dismissed as inefficient protectionism, since most of the resources involved in this process would have little or no opportunity cost for society as a whole.(3)
In effect, we are proposing the formalization of a dual economy. By recognizing the permanence of a sharply stratified society, the country will be in a better position to design policies that recognize and take advantage of these differences to improve the welfare of people in both sectors. A strategy that offers succor to rural communities, a means to make productive diversification possible, will make the management of growth easier in those areas developing links with the international economy. But more importantly, such a strategy will offer an opportunity for the society to actively confront the challenges of environmental management and conservation in a meaningful way, with a group of people uniquely qualified for such activities.(4)
The dual economy is not new. Unlike the present version that permeates all our societies, confronting rich and poor, the proposal calls for creating structures so that one segment of society that chooses to live in rural areas finds support from the rest of the nation to implement an alternative regional development program. The new variant starts from the inherited base of rural production, improving productivity by using the techniques of agroecology. It also involves incorporating new activities that build on the cultural and resource base of the community and the region for further development. It requires very specific responses to a general problem and therefore depends heavily on local involvement in design and implementation. While the broad outlines are widely discussed, the specifics require investment programs for direct producers and their partners.(5)
What is new is the introduction of an explicit strategy to strengthen the social and economic base for a dual structure. By recognizing and encouraging the marginal groups to create an alternative that would offer marginal groups better prospects for their own development, the dual economy proposal might be mistaken to be the simple formalization of the "war on poverty" or "solidarity" approach to the alleviation of the worst effects of marginality. This would be erroneous. Rather than a simple transfer of resources to compensate groups for their poverty, we require an integrated set of productive projects that offer rural communities the opportunity to generate goods and services that will contribute to raising their living standards while also improving the environment in which they live.
Once announced to the world, the spectacle of the wintering lepidoptera began to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors who make the pilgrimage to the reserves that were created so that this winged caller might enjoy some degree of protection from the ravages of encroachment by human activities. As a result, many of the people living in the region have come to resent the intruder; its annual visits have brought increasing government regulation of their lives, effective appropriation of their lands, intense social conflict and heightened immiserization.
There are serious social and economic problems in the protected area. Many of these problems are simply local manifestations of the larger crisis of Mexican society, making it difficult for poor rural producers to survive by continuing their traditional activities. In this protected area, people have been particularly affected by specific conservation measures that intensified the adjustment process. The declaration of certain important areas to be part of the nuclear and buffer zones of the reserve, led to a prohibition or severe restriction on traditional forestry activities, without offering the communities or their members compensation for the reclassification of their lands or alternative productive opportunities with which they might earn a livelihood elsewhere in the region.
The region's problems and those of the communities did not begin in 1986 and cannot be attributed solely to the butterflies. Local systems of control by economic elites and political bosses were an important part of the local scene long before the visitors acquired their new found fame. Industrial demand for sources of pulp, and local mechanisms to concentrate the wealth and opportunities were already creating pressures on the forests and dividing individual communities as well as pitting one against another. The opportunities created by the unbridled expansion of tourism and the arbitrary distribution of the spoils among a very small group of people compounded the problems.
In this environment, a new approach to regional development is required. While there is a general recognition that ecotourism can offer more opportunities to the people, it is also clear that without other, complementary productive activities that create jobs and income, the people in the region will continue their environmentally destructive activities that also threaten the viability of the fir forests in which the Monarch nests.
A local network of NGOs and confederations of communities and productive groups has begun to play an important role in creating these opportunities. There appears to be an understanding of the great cost that was incurred as a result of the internecine warfare that the strategies of bureaucratic imposition created. The principal limitation, I think, is the lack of a mechanism for the various groups to implement realistic productive strategies; they need information about resources and markets, as well as mechanism to channel available resources more effectively. The organizations require a process of local cooperation, constructed on a firm basis of broad based effective local participation. This is the route to creating a "dual society" in which ecotourism would contribute to an overall strategy of sustainable development.
Altieri, Miguel A. 1987. Agroecology: the scientific basis of alternative agriculture. Westview. Boulder, CO.
Andrae, Gunilla and Bjorn Beckman. 1985. The Wheat Trap. Zed Books. London.
Barkin, David 1990. Distorted Development: Mexico in the world economy. Westview. Boulder, CO.
_____, R. Batt, and B. DeWalt 1990. Food Crops vs. Feed Crops: The global substitution of grains in production. Lynne Rienner. Boulder, CO.
Barraclough, Solon 1991. An End to Hunger? The social origins of food strategies. Zed Press and United Nations Research Institute in Social Development. London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ.
Chapela, Gonzalo and David Barkin 1995. Monarcas y Campesinos: Estrategia de desarrollo sustentable en el oriente de Michoacán. Centro de Ecologia y Desarrollo. Mexico.
Friedmann, John 1992. Empowerment: The politics of alternative development. Basil Blackwell. New York.
_____ and Haripriya Rangan 1993. In Defense of Livelihood: Comparative studies on environmental action. Kumarian Press. West Hartford, CT.
Fundacion Nacional para el Desarrollo (FUNDE) 1994. Bases para la Construccion de un Nuevo Proyecto Economico Nacional para El Salvador. San Salvador.
Garcia, Rolando 1981. Drought and Man, Vol 1: Nature Pleads Not Guilty. Pergamon Press. London.
Glade, William and Charles Reilley (eds.) 1993. Inquiry at the Grassroots: An Inter-American Foundation reader. Inter-American Foundation. Arlington, VA.
Lewis, W. Arthur 1954. "Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour," republished in A.N. Agarwala and S.P. Singh 1963. Economics of Underdevelopment. Oxford. New York.
Red Interamericana de Agriculturas y Democracia (RIAD). 1993. Que es la agricultura sustentable? Grupo de Estudios Ambientales y RIAD. Mexico.
Sen, Amartya 1981. Poverty and Famines. Oxford University Press. New York.
_____ 1992. Inequality Reexamined. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.
Sunkel, Osvaldo 1993. Development from Within: Toward a neostructuralist approach for Latin America. Lynne Rienner. Boulder, CO.
2. The complexity of the task of ending hunger is widely recognized. But recent literature has stressed the social rather than the technical (or supply-based) origins of famine and hunger; Sen (1981, 1982) is a particularly effective exponent of this point, while others have gone into greater detail about the "social origins" of food strategies and crises (Barkin et al. 1990; Garcia 1981; Barraclough 1991). The "modernization" of urban diets in Nigeria, by substituting wheat and rice for sorghum and millet, is an egregious case of creating dependency, reducing opportunities for peasant producers and raising the social cost of feeding a nation (see Andrae and Beckman 1985).
3. Many analysts dismiss peasant producers as working on too small a scale and with too few resources to be efficient. While it is possible and even necessary to promote increased productivity, consistent with a strategy of sustainable production, as defined by agroecologists, the proposal to encourage them to remain as productive members of their communities should be implemented under existing conditions.
In much of Latin America, if peasants ceased to produce basic crops, the lands and inputs are not often simply transferable to other farmers for commercial output. The low opportunity costs of primary production in peasant and indigenous regions derives from the lack of alternative productive employment for the people and the lands in this sector. Although the people would generally have to seek income in the "informal sector," their contribution to national output would be meager. The difference between the social criteria for evaluating the cost of this style of production and the market valuation is based on the determination of the sacrifices society would make in undertaking one or the other option. theoretical basis for this approach harks back to the initial essay of W. Arthur Lewis (1954) and subsequent developments that find their latest expression in the call for a "neostructuralist" approach to development for Latin America (Sunkel 1993).
4. Much of the literature on popular participation emphasizes the multifaceted contribution that the productive incorporation of marginal groups can make to society. (Friedmann 1992; Friedmann and Rangan 1993; Stiefel and Wolfe 1994) While very little has been done on specific strategies for sustainability in poor rural communities, it is clear that much of the experience recounted by practitioners with grassroots groups (e.g. Glade and Reilly 1993) is consistent with the principles enunciated by theorists and analysts like Altieri (1987).
5. For the more general discussion, see Adelman 1984 and Barkin 1990, ch 7. FUNDE (1994) offers a specific program for the reconversion of El Salvador based on the principles discussed in Section 4 of this paper. The proposals of groups like the IAF and RIAD offer specific examples of ongoing grassroots efforts to implement initiatives like those discussed in the text. The Ecology and Development Center in Mexico is pursuing a program of regional development consistent with the proposed strategy. (Chapela and Barkin 1995)
The poor are more likely than other groups to engage in direct actions to protect and improve the environment.
P. 4: Rural communities were characterized by the diversity of the productive activities in which they engaged to assure their subsistence.
p. 5: We are proposing the formalization of a dual economy. By recognizing the permanence of a sharply stratified society, the country will be in a better position to design policies that recognize and take advantage of these differences to improve the welfare of people in both sectors.
P. 6: the proposal calls for creating structures so that one segment of society that chooses to live in rural areas finds support from the rest of the nation to implement an alternative regional development program.
P. 6: Rather than a simple transfer of resources to compensate groups for their poverty, we require an integrated set of productive projects that offer rural communities the opportunity to generate goods and services that will contribute to raising their living standards while also improving the environment in which they live.
P. 7: The problem of ecotourism in the Monarch butterfly reserves are discussed at length along with a proposal for an alternative dualistic strategy in Gonzalo Chapela and David Barkin, Monarcas y Campesinos: Una estrategia de desarrollo sustentable.
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