Opinion | Poverty Tourism: Exploring Different Dimensions

Poverty is an abyss that everyone wants to avoid. Those who are cruelly acquainted with it, stake everything to climb out of it, and those who are bestowed with riches, do everything in their power to avoid being engulfed in it. This avoidance manifests as either making oneself more rich, or maintaining the status quo and keeping the poor bound to poverty.

Tourism, on the other hand, functions inversely with respect to poverty. While poverty is characterised by a lack of money and resources, tourism is just the opposite. Tourism is one of the largest industries in terms of money spent by tourists and money received by the tourist agencies and respective Ministries.

How then, by virtue of being so contrasting and inherently different, do poverty and tourism combine to produce a larger issue?

Poverty and tourism combine like yin and yang, to produce something known as “Poverty Tourism”, which essentially entails ‘touring’ or a personal observation of poverty. It functions in the same way as regular tourism does, be it paying a tourist agency for a day trip to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA, or a full-fledged package for a stay at a luxurious hotel in Maldives. Poverty tours promise their customers ‘authentic’ experiences of poverty. These authentic experiences however, are marketed as ‘safe’, which is contradictory to the fact that we most often associate crime and danger with poverty.

To some, the idea of touring an impoverished neighbourhood, slum or region, might seem bizarre. After all, why would one pay to venture into unsanitary and dilapidated environments? A primary goal of poverty tourism is to provide the tourists with a sense of gratitude for the things the slum dwellers are not capable of acquiring. Tourists wearing good quality sports shoes and sunscreens with strong SPF protection, carrying borrowed mineral water bottles, are exposed to the plight of those who can barely afford 2 square meals a day. While practicing is a great way to grow as an individual, doing it at the expense of others in a dehumanising way is certainly not the way to go about it.

Advocates of poverty tourism argue that it provides an impetus to the local communities, by generating human integrations, connections and also an economic boost to some extent, by drawing attention to the locally produced products. Furthermore, advocates also strengthen their case by bringing in the “Pareto superiority” argument in their favour. Pareto superiority is a concept wherein during an exchange, one party gains something, but the other party is not necessarily made worse off, or does not lose anything.

Applied in this context, it would mean that the tourists who engage in poverty tourism gain insight, knowledge, experiences that they can learn from, but the poor residents do not necessarily lose, say, money or anything material by being observed by the tourists. While this is not entirely false, it is not entirely ethical either, since the residents are dehumanized and treated as ‘showpieces’, as if they were in a ‘human zoo’. Those on the criticizing side could also stretch the Pareto superiority argument against the advocates and say that while the residents do not lose anything, it does not stop them from being looked down upon and being subject to voyeurism under the garb of altruism.

At the end of the day, the truth remains that the residents being observed are in unfortunate conditions, and this misfortune of theirs is converted into a ‘spectacle’ to be exhibited, ultimately bringing in profit to the tourism agencies. Would we then agree that poverty tourism is a kind of indulgence, which the privileged use to satisfy their curiosity about others’ unfortunate conditions? Tours and ‘entertainment’ of this kind loop the poor residents and the well-off tourists into a cycle of social subordination, degradation and disdain. Moreover, when the conditions and daily lives of the residents are presented in distorted ways to match the preconceived notions and assumptions of the tourists, it only serves to reinforce the beliefs, ideologies and superiority of the privileged class. One such agenda that has recently taken the spotlight, is the White Saviour Syndrome, where white skinned individuals believe that owing to their relatively ‘more advantageous’ or ‘more privileged’ position in the social hierarchy, they are responsible for liberating BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour), since BIPOC are incapable of helping themselves. This is socially ingrained into people via movies, elite ideologies and regional/ national political narratives.

While poverty tourists are without doubt a large stakeholder in this business of turning misfortune to riches, we must not forget about the accountability that the tour operators owe the poor residents. The likelihood of exploitation in this business is dangerously high. Since the tour operators and agencies possess cultural, knowledge and wealth capital, they are in a position to socially dominate the poor. The terms of the tours are dominated and manipulated single handedly by the agencies, and grounds for negotiation are slim; not to mention the privacy and consent violations that the poor are often forced into.

Many academicians have discussed the commodification of love, local and regional vulnerable identities, peoples’ bodies, so on and so forth. Poverty doesn’t seem to have made it out of the list either. This industry not only commodifies and capitalises upon the disadvantageous social standing of the poor…