Comment: Travel and tourism is vital but vulnerable in an unstable world

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, spoke to the UN World Tourism Organisation’s Global Tourism Forum in Andorra live from New York as part of a session on responsible tourism.

Sachs declared tourism “the natural ally of sustainable development”, but issued a warning. He decried the failure of the US to embrace sustainability, arguing this made global solutions impossible at present and made regional efforts – such as those in the European Union – vital. This is what he had to say:

“This is an extraordinarily complex time in the world and it is going to rattle the tourism industry.

“A lot of growth has been unleashed in developing countries, where economies are growing at extraordinary rates. That is extremely promising for tourism. The amount of South-to-South tourism, if I might call it that, will be enormous. Hundreds of millions of people will join the middle classes. It is remarkably exciting for development and for tourism.

“But our planet is increasingly unstable, with political indecision and confusion, and the instability is rebounding on the tourism sector. There has been no success so far in developing a serious approach to climate change, no success in developing alternative energy sources. So food prices are at an all-time high as a result of growing world demand. The oil price is rising.

“The world system has so far proved incapable of responding. We are back to one billion hungry people in the world. There are many reasons for the recent social unrest, but soaring food prices is one of the factors. Sustainability is the issue.

“We face climate shocks. China is in the grip of a severe drought that will likely cause food prices to tick upward significantly later in the year. An industry like tourism which depends on a healthy and safe environment, on reliable supplies and social stability, is in peril.

“Travel and tourism is a huge creator of economic value, a huge benefit to society, but it is extremely vulnerable to the lack of attention to sustainable development. Tourism will be the first to suffer. We need tourism to take a message to governments that ‘the industry will be destabilised’.

“Tourism is essential for bringing people together. The industry can make an enormous contribution. It is one of the most important ways a poor country can get a foothold on the world economy. It is the natural ally of sustainable development. But it is fragile.

“The world is in a new phase – a phase of transformation. There is a lot of evidence we are coming up against boundary conditions on oil, on water, on climate. World economic growth is now pushing against the physical limits and we are not able to take a coherent global view. The political leadership in the US is not interested in understanding.

“Almost no one predicted the financial crisis [of 2008]. But there was a lot of anxiety [that the system was unsustainable] among experts. Many were saying that the high level of consumption and low level of saving had to have a bad end. Our political system is very bad at listening to bad news. No one in the US government wanted to know about it. The US is not taking these issues seriously and that creates more instability.

“In the US, the oil and coal companies own the political debate and block everything, and the US blocks the rest. We cannot expect solutions at a global level now. We have to raise voices at a regional level for sustainable development.”

* Jeffrey Sachs is a neo-liberal economist who acts as special advisor to the UN secretary general. His book The End of Poverty was a precursor to developing the UN’s Millennium Development Goals on poverty alleviation. Sachs was also an author of the economic shock therapy in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall.