The new slavery?

Mike Phipps reviews Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean by Polly Pattullo, published by Latin American Books, £14.99.

As Michael Manley points out in the foreword to this thought-provoking book, tourism is now seen by some as the only means of survival for Caribbean countries. Today these islands are one of the top ten world tourist destinations. As old industries become uncompetitive and go into decline in the face of NAFTA and other free trade agreements, tourism offers both a chance for development - and a new basis for dependency.

In the last 20 years the number of tourists to the region has increased sixfold to an annual 14 million. Many of them come on package tours controlled by western tour companies, which have the power to withdraw their trade from certain hoteliers, resorts or even whole islands. When Manley's radical government was elected in Jamaica in the 1970s, tour operators engineered a big drop in tourism - and consequently in the country's export earnings.

The benefits of tourism for the region's economy and environment are, to say the least, contradictory. The average tourist consumes six times as much water as a local resident. For every dollar tourists bring in, 70 cents go out in imports to service their extravagant needs.

Two thirds of hotels in the Caribbean are foreign owned. Increasingly, all-inclusive hotel complexes exclude local people -even from the adjoining beach. Cuba is one of the worst culprits, banning its residents even from tourist bars and restaurants.

The environmental impact is a further problem. Beach erosion is widespread, caused by piers for yachting marinas or tree-felling to 'improve' the view from the hotel. Other problems include waste and sewage dumping, coral reef breakdown, the destruction of wetlands and sand mining to build artificial beaches. Even 'eco-tourism' is not blameless - especially where brochures advertise - "unspoiled Amerindian settlements" as part of the attractions.

One recent typical controversy involved the building of a Swiss-owned hotel complex over 320 acres in St Lucia. The site was a traditionally sacred area between two volcanoes. The project was compared to "a take-away concession inside Stonehenge" by St Lucia's Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott. Local fishermen were no longer able to work the bay where guests lay on imported sand. Amerindian relics were destroyed when the tennis court was built on a burial site.

Many are also concerned about the impact on the islands' contemporary culture, when the principal form of work is servicing the leisure requirements of white trippers. "Tourism is whorism" sums up the attitude of critics in some of the islands, who feel that relations with the First World are little more than a replication of slavery.

"Without the large hotels, most of the islands would dry up and blow away... Hilton is probably doing more to further local island cultures than any one else," scoffed an American travel magazine of the 1970s. This book provides an essential antidote for those who want to travel without illusions..

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