TOURISM IS DESTROYING ISLAND ENVIRONMENTS AND LOCAL PEOPLES.

22 May 2024

The irony - just as we are discovering the traditional charms of islands, they are being destroyed by over-tourism, rocketing real estate prices as wealthy foreigners buy in. This is the same for Mallorca, as for Bali, and maybe sunny islands with liberal economic and social climates everywhere.

It is more marked in Majorca as the foreigners from Northern Europe are now buying into the hinterland, having bought up along the coast, transforming the demographic and socio-economic landscape. The locals are in revolt. Could a similar takeover be mounted in Gibraltar? Perhaps not the Falkland Islands...

Then there are the cruise liners and the serious pollution they cause.

EU reg.s mean that the locals lose control of their Balearic Islands, and house prices for their children take off. 

Again, a phenomenon we are familiar with: take down the borders and let the global rich come in and pick over your assets. Let them build their secluded, gated, inland, high-security settlements (sorry, "enclaves") and run your islands for their benefit, using your people as cheap labour. We could call this "soft apartheid". Of course, it doesn't help the regular tourist, but at least the tourist is a visitor and not part of the interned labour camp.

Where will this trend lead to? It looks like the Balearic Islands are becoming an important economic tax-collection hub for the government in Madrid, same same Bali for Jakarta. Maybe a third or half of Bali's tourists are from Indonesia itself, notably from Java, so difficult to control by visa, but Bali does have a tourist tax, which is quite low at the moment. The idea being to choke off the poorer tourists and focus on those with money, ie go upmarket, which is of course every tourist resort's dream.

But this is all part of the problem that many of us find ourselves commenting on almost every day, where the only thing that counts is the economy and that means, let's get real about this, the financial interests principally of the global elite. 

While in Bali, there is a great sense of peace and mutual respect between the Hindu and Muslim populations, nonetheless, there is some annoyance that lower skilled job availability in Bali is pulling in labour from Java to compete with local-born, keeping down the wages of the poorer indigenous Balinese people. 

Nor is Bali a very diverse economy. It depends 80% on tourism. And this makes it very vulnerable. Covid was a very bad time for the people of Bali, though good for nature, and bad for Thailand too and tourist resorts everywhere. To the credit of governments, they did not run up massive debts on unnecessary protection programs that were in reality huge opportunities for elite corruption.

Our politicians have no concept of balance between economic benefits (from tourism in this case) and foreign investment (in real estate) and, importantly, respect for local culture, people and the environment (maintaining affordable living conditions for the local population, preserving the island's unique character that includes a clean nature, releasing change on people at a pace the human animal can take). These invasions are stressing local peoples everywhere.

Once again, this demonstrates the limits, or purposes, that a liberal democratic system of governance can offer to ordinary people.