Beyond Greening - Tourism Watch

Beyond Greening: Reflections on Tourism in the Rio-Process | PositioningpaperThe need for networkingIn 2003, the 1 st International Seminar for Sustainable Tourism (SITS) was organised inFortaleza, Ceará. A week before the opening session, 40 members from 15 communities fromnorth-eastern and northern regions of Brazil got together for the first gathering ever to discusscommunity-based tourism in Brazil. The workshop took place in the small fishing village ofPrainha do Canto Verde, 110 km from Fortaleza. Though they had never met before,participants from the Atlantic Ocean, community representatives from the state of Roraimaand Ceará, women from the mountains of Cariri, Ceará and Pará where the Amazon meets thesea, started to discover how much they had in common.Mostly traditional and indigenous people, they were pursuing protected areas to have a legalbasis for land rights and conservation. Being from communities which struggled to defendtheir homeland and care for their natural support system – nature – united them in solidarity.The great majority of the communities havesome kind of environmental educationproject for children and adults in thecommunities. They all protect their naturalheritage and preserve the history of theirancestors. Unknown to most outsiders, theycare for the environment without chargingfor the services. They are stewards of theenvironment. Six of the 15 communitieswere already offering tourism services andthe other nine had come to join the newnetwork. They travelled home with thecertainty that yes, "A different kind oftourism is possible".The conference in Fortaleza was the first of its kind in Brazil and the communityrepresentatives who met the week before in Prainha do Canto Verde made the openingpresentation to over 400 participants from civil society, government academics and tourismprofessionals. Tourism Secretary representatives and the trade were clearly not prepared forwhat was going to be presented over the next three days. Human rights issues were a priority,not overnights and tourist arrivals. The conservation of coastal marine resources and illegalfishing are crucial issues for the survival of communities, but do not seem to be important forinvestors, the government or the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank(IDB). The organizers – the local NGO Terramar and State of Ceará University, together withEuropean NGOs such as EED Tourism Watch (Germany), the Working Group on Tourismand Development and the Foundation for Solidarity in Tourism (Switzerland), ECPATNetherlands, and Turismo Responsabile (Italy), prepared the field and put communitytourism on the agenda in order to start lobbying federal, state and municipal governments togive communities a fair share in developing tourism as an instrument for local economicdevelopment in communities all over Brazil.After the 1 st SITS, NGOs and communities started to network with other Latin Americancountries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico and others where communitytourism had been developed about 20 years earlier. They discovered the same common bonds– traditional and indigenous people struggling for land rights, protecting the environment andusing sustainable methods to use natural resources and treat the land with respect for nature.The majority of the destinations, whether on the coast or in forests, were either already part ofprotected areas or were in the process of creating them. Until three years ago, the35