| Welshman Andy Drumm lives in Ecuador
where he is involved in tourism and in sustainable development
in a variety of different capacities. He runs Tropic Journeys in Nature, the Amazon representative of the
Ecuadorean Ecotourism Association and has recently set up an
NGO to focus on sustainable development in the Amazon Region.
Matthew Gorman spoke to him in Quito last summer about ecotourism
in Ecuador and the issues that it raises.
MG: How did you come to Ecuador in the first place and
what does your work here involve?
AD: I came to Ecuador for the first time in 1985: as an ecologist
I'd always wanted to visit the Galapagos Islands, so after I
graduated I came down on an extended trip, fell in love with
the islands and applied i Britain for a job as a naturalist
guide. I came back to do this in 1987 and worked in the Galapagos
Islands as a guide and dive master for 6 years. Then I started
on an MPhil/PhD thesis evaluating ecotourism's potential as
a sustainable alternative in the Amazon Region. In the process
of doing the research I got to know the Amazon Region very well,
got involved in oil issues and did a lot of advisory work including
work for tourism companies, NGOs and communities, in the Amazon
and other parts of Ecuador.
I set up Tropic as an attempt to put into practice what I was
preaching to other companies about how to do ecotourism. I'm
also one of the more active members of the EEA and for the last
few years have been President of the Amazon Commission of the
EEA. In the context of that I have just finished organising
the National Forum for Community Participation in Ecotourism.
The British Embassy is actually helping out with the cost of
publication.
My travel company is doing a lot of work in the Amazon with
communities and in protected areas, but we've always worked
in the Galapagos as well: between us we've got about 20 years
experience of working there. We're also working on the coast
developing a whale-watching programme and in the Sierra (the
highlands) in the cloud forest.
MG: How does ecotourism fit into the national economy and
development plans? One of the things which has struck me is
that while oil and tourism are both in the top five list of
Ecuadorean earners, they are almost totally incompatible in
the Oriente (the Amazon Region of the country, where most oil
is extracted from).
AD: One of the main resolutions of the forum that I organised
was that there should be a moratorium on all non-sustainable
activities in natural areas or areas being used for ecotourism.
One of my tasks now is to turn that resolution into a policy
and a regulation for the law and for the government. People
are very conscious in ecotourism and in the communities and
the NGOs that oil development and ecotourism are not compatible,
so we should have separate areas for these things. We consider
that National Parks and Wildlife Reserves protected by the state
should only be available for sustainable economic activities
and that they should be free from oil exploitation until such
time as it can be shown that oil can be taken out of the ground
without destroying the environment and the culture, and I think
that's still a long way off in Ecuador. If we regulate ecotourism
and define it as a sustainable activity which conserves the
environment and gives value to traditional cultures, then we
can talk about areas where ecotourism is permissible, and that
may well include protected areas, National Parks and so on.
One of the things that the EEA is trying to show is that Ecuador's
touristic future is in ecotourism - there's no use in Ecuador
building five star hotels on beaches and trying to compete with
the Caribbean, because our beaches aren't so nice, the waters
aren't transparent, and it's more expensive to get to from the
States, which is our main market. Really, what we're very strong
in, despite the 25 years of oil exploitation, is abundant and
diverse natural resources - biodiversity, indigenous culture
- and those are the things that have to be the main attractions
for our future tourism development. What sorts of things are
you going to do with those resources? - it's going to be ecotourism.
MG: That's what Costa Rica said at the beginning as well,
though things may be different there now.
AD: They certainly are. What happened is that once Costa Rica
began to get a flow of tourists the activity was hijacked by
the mainstream tour operators. Now it's gone the way of big
hotels, beaches and charter flights. I think we're a bit slower
here in Ecuador about getting the tourist industry organised
around ecotourism, but at the same time I think we're taking
more solid steps, like this process of community participation,
which didn't ever happen in Costa Rica. We're getting ecotourism
defined in a tourism law and then regulating and controlling
it for the first time, and we were the first country in Latin
America to create an Ecotourism Association. We were also the
first country to agree an evaluation programme with the Ecotourism
Society, whereby tourist operators were evaluated by clients
according to the fulfillment of a set of guidelines. It's only
a start but they gave us feedback as to how well we were fulfilling
what ecotourism goals are. A lot of people in Ecuador still
use ecotourism as a catchphrase for getting the interest of
tourists, but there is an increasing number of tour operators
who really do have a commitment to sustainability and sensitivity.
MG: Do views vary within the Ecotourism Association?
AD: There's a diversity of operators within the Ecotourism
Association, it has to be said, and not all of us have the same
view. Through the EEA though I was able to organise this forum
for national community participation, which for the traditional
mainstream tourism industry is something that they're concerned
about: they don't want to be encouraging communities or empowering
them or having communities directly involved. They've always
gone in from the outside and planned and managed everything
from the outside. That's not compatible with conservation -
if the communities are not directly involved with the benefits
and the planning, they're not going to be conserving their toucans
for big company tourists to come and see. They're going to hunt
them just to get some revenge. The people really need to be
involved in the process and in the activity if they're going
to make the links with conservation.
MG: Who were the participants in the forum?
AD: In the Amazon workshop there were about 50 participants
- 50% of them representatives from different Amazon communities
which I'd visited in the three weeks before to talk about the
process and get them thinking about it. They filled out with
me a questionnaire survey as to how their ecotourism operation
was and what their perception of ecotourism was. 15% were private
sector companies, which was less than desired, 15% NGOs, 10%
government - local and national. We had about another 50 people
in the coastal workshop and about 100 in the national forum,
with a similar breakdown of figures - in the national probably
40% communities, 15-20% private sector, 15-20% NGOs and government.
MG: What were the sort of conclusions that came out?
AD: There was a very clear perception of this whole oil issue
- that oil was undermining ecotourism and that we had to have
areas to do ecotourism that would be free from oil exploitation,
and ideally those should be the national parks and other natural
areas. There were commitments to respect procedures for entering
into agreements with local communities: firstly that when you
go into a natural area you should seek to incorporate the local
community in the actual planning process. That was quite clear
and that's never been the case before. It was recognised that
a legal framework should be established to enable local and
indigenous communities to manage their own ecotourism operations,
without having to fulfil all the bureaucratic paperwork and
so on that you need to do to form a travel agency or a tour
operator.
MG: I'd imagine that for most communities the cost is quite
prohibitive isn't it?
AD: If you take a community in remote Cuyabeno or Yasuni (Amazon
National Parks), who are successful in receiving tourists, they're
not going to be in a position to come to Quito, contract lawyers,
hang around for weeks on end going from the prefecture to the
travel agents, getting bank guarantees, opening bank accounts,
going to the local town council - it's just totally unfeasible.
However the government shut down the most successful community
enterprise in Capirona last year because it hadn't got these
things. The community continued to work in tourism though.
MG: What is the current legal situation with regard to
communities?
AD: Communities have no rights to operate right now as communities,
they have to create companies. One result of this forum was
a commitment from all sectors to legalise community operations.
That's a fantastic breakthrough and that included the government.
The next thing now is to go through the nuts and bolts of getting
that into legislation. Communities don't want to be involved
in activities that encourage them to chop down their forest.
They want to have an income and maintain their environment and
their culture.
MG: How does self-regulation of tourism work at the moment
with regard to these issues? What are the percentages of tour
operators who are actually members of the EEA?
AD: We've got about 30 tour operator members. I'm not sure
how many exist in Ecuador but there are a lot more. I think
it's still generally the case that a lot of operators use the
word 'eco' to attract tourists, but things are definitely progressing.
Above all, ecotourism is mentioned in the new Tourism Law and
we're working on regulating that reference. Ecotourism will
then become something that's specific and will include everything
from carrying capacity recognitions and calculations, to environmental
impact assessments for projects and participation of local communities
in the planning and management of the activity.
MG: How will this regulation be enforced?
AD: I haven't thought it out that far, but if people are promoting
themselves as ecotourism and then not fulfilling what the law
says, I would assume they would make themselves vulnerable to
government sanctions. People like us in the EEA would be very
interested in making sure that people did not abuse the term
and benefit by marketing themselves as ecotourism operators,
but not fulfil any of the commitments. This is what we aim to
do within the Ecotourism Association at the moment - the commitments
which are necessary are part of ecotourism operations.
MG: In terms of how the legislation's going through how
receptive is ASECUT (the national tour operators body)?
AD: They actually sponsored a tourism industry drafted regulation
proposal for the tourism law which the EEA were invited to participate
in. We made some changes to the draft to the effect that ecotourism
was a separate activity within tourism, which we would then
regulate, and they went along with it. I haven't seen the final
document but it would appear that the tourism industry is accepting
the existence of ecotourism as a separate activity with separate
requirements, although this was not previously their understanding.
MG: Has the government been receptive too?
AD: Yes, but until we get this on paper and published in the
official register of regulations, nothing is said and done.
The situation is still that ecotourism is not regulated and
that communities are still illegally operating. Ecuador may
be the first country to actually regulate ecotourism - I'm not
sure any other country has done more than just use it as a promotional
tool. I think that Ecuador is way ahead of most of the rest
of the world in terms of implementing real ecotourism. If we
can get this legislation sorted I think we'll be in a really
good position to start being active on the details of getting
things done - training, reorienting, promoting Ecuador as an
ecotourism destination, and be confident of meaning it and knowing
it and it not just being hype.
MG: What about tourist awareness - how does that fit into
things?
AD: Tourist awareness is one of the incentives for tour operators
to fulfil ecotourism goals. A lot of tourist operators out in
the frontier towns now talk a good talk, even if they're not
walking the walk, because they've heard tourists ask what they're
doing with their trash, so they're making an effort at least
to be aware of the issues. Tourists play an important role in
educating tour operators but on the other hand backpacker tourists
are often looking for the most economic tour possible, and so
will seek out tour operators who are not spending more on paying
indigenous people decent wages and on the cost of taking their
trash back to the cities. These people tend to come by with
Lonely Planet handbook and go for the cheapest thing they can
find, the least environmentally and culturally friendly. So
there's a need to raise tourist awareness in certain markets
before they come here The other aspect of tourism awareness
is what brought Tropic into existence - we're interested in
raising visitor's awareness about the social and environmental
issues in the areas that they vi sit.. I was a guide in Galapagos
for years before I set up Tropic and a trade union organiser
in London before I did that, and I was interested how tourism
could play a more positive role in conservation and environmental
protection. Through our trips in Tropic we are committed to
raising the visitors' awareness of what's going on and not trying
to let them think they're in some kind of heavenly cocoon. They're
going to the most beautiful places on the planet but at the
same time we want to make sure that they're aware of the threats
to these places, and how, having had the privilege of visiting
these areas, they can contribute to their protection. The idea
is that by visiting a place that most people never have the
chance to visit, they transmit the emotion and education that
they got as a result.
MG: How optimistic are you about the law, in terms of national
priorities and conflict between government departments with
different objectives?
AD: The law won't be the solution, but it will significantly
strengthen the position of people looking to make tourism sustainable.
We now have a Ministry of the Environment in Ecuador which in
theory will work very nicely and support what we're trying to
do. It will be another step towards raising awareness at institutional
and state level of sustainability in the whole process of development
of the country. Hopefully we'll be pushing oil industry into
one section instead of something that dominates everything:
it will be just one aspect of Ecuador's development. No one's
saying let's stop all oil development, we're just saying let's
not destroy everything in the process - let's not destroy our
future ecotourism industry in the process. |
