The world with AFP and Reuters Published October 01, 2018 at 01: 38 – last updated October 01, 2018 at 12: 54 p.m.

Voluntourism has exploded over the last few decades, with the voluntourist market now peaking at US$2.6bn per year. Like shopping for a new shampoo, would-be volunteers can peruse thousands of online Volunteer Sending Organizations (VSOs) for programs all over the developing world. From rescuing miniature monkeys in the Amazon to teaching orphans English in Somalia, voluntourist programs have been lavished with praise from outlets as diverse as CNN and National Geographic Traveller.

Why the love affair?

The general consensus to date has been that volunteer tourism is good for everyone because it:

• Fosters selflessness and cultural awareness
• Brings people from different parts of the global village together
• Brings revenue to the developing community
• Utilizes volunteer labor for underfunded projects
• and Promotes ecological sustainability.

One participant in the US based Earthwatch Programme which toured conservation projects of central America sums it up in her voluntourist diary:

‘Volunteers obviously provide free manpower to the scientists, but more importantly, upon our return home, we can raise awareness of the voluntourism issues we witnessed with our own eyes’.

Sounds great! So what’s the problem?

You are a child living in an orphanage in Thailand that is dependent on the funds and labor of voluntourists. They come to teach you English for several weeks each, comically and monotonously repeating the same introductory lessons over and over. You have a perfect grasp of ‘Hi, how are you’, and ‘My name is’, but you never have the same teacher long enough to get any further. You don’t understand these people, and you have learned not to get too attached. Why do they all keep trying to teach you the same thing? And where are they going in such a hurry? Unfortunately, I didn’t make this story up; according to Pierre De Hanscutter, president of SJVietnam (a youth non-profit VSO) it’s being written into chapter one of thousands of lives right now. His is just one of a number of critical voices which are raising themselves above the top of the warm and fuzzy clamour. These voices say that voluntourism can result in:

• Programs which ignore locals’ real wants and needs
• Work being left unfinished or done badly due to voluntourists lack of skills
• Voluntourists taking jobs from locals and creating dependence on foreign donors
• Feelings of differences being reinforced rather than broken down because of the obvious gap in wealth and power between volunteers and people they are ‘helping’.
• Voluntourists coming away from the experience feeling as though they have ‘done their bit’ and don’t need to do any more, either in their own country or elsewhere.
• The presence of volunteers changing the local culture and economy so that communities lose their culture and traditions.
• Volunteers feeding corrupt practices by handing cash over to dodgy organizations.

Development volunteer and journalist J.B MacKinnon worries that voluntourism is becoming a ‘consumer experience’ catering to the needs of the paying volunteer. After a quick glance at a couple of VSO websites I could see his point. Rather than talk about the needs of communities and matching skills to positions, they promise an easy ‘adventure experience’ so you can be ‘doing something different’ and pursuing ‘personal development’. The alarm bells started ringing: exactly who is this industry working for?

For a few enterprising people, it’s working very, very well. Many voluntourism programs come with a hefty price tag attached, and few programs have transparent systems of accountability. Take Sarah’s account of her experience in Ghana.

She and 17 others each contributed AU$1500 to build toilets over six weeks, pooling a budget of $27,000 in a community where the average villager earns $5 per month. ‘So imagine how I felt’, she writes, ‘when I discovered that our accommodation was not paid for, the utilities were not paid for, the builder’s time was unpaid, and the only thing our budget seemed to be used for was to purchase a couple of effluent pipes…So, what happened to the $27,000? You tell me… If you contacted a Chief or Assembly Man in a local community in a country like Ghana…you could use your $1500 to help those who really needed it’. Read more and find out what is the aim of voluntourism?

So if volunteer tourism is such a minefield, why do it at all?

The thing about voluntourism is that there is no real way of measuring it’s effects, so arguments either for or against are mostly based on individual experiences. If a young American develops a social conscience as a result of a stint of voluntouring, and goes on to invest ethically in their fifties, how can you ever say for sure that one led to the other?

So basically the only way that you can navigate the voluntourism minefield is with a little common sense and a grain of salt. Stephen Wearing, author of Volunteer Tourism: Experiences that Make a Difference argues that while it is not a panacea, of all the various ways to travel volunteer tourism is still the most responsible. He highlights the success of programs such as the locally controlled ecotourism project in the Santa Elena community of Costa Rica, where forest conservation has been coupled with youth education. Voluntourists contribute to forest conservation, and their fees are channeled back into environmental education in a transparent manner. He has a point: while it is important to critically analyze the contradictions of voluntourism, it is important not to toss the backpacker out with the bathwater.

Research and communication is the answer

The crucial point is to ask yourself first of all why you want to do this in the first place. Do you really want to do something for other people in places which are dangerous, confronting or uncomfortable? Or, is it more about offloading some middle class guilt? How can you really help? Figure out what you feel you can contribute, for how long, where and in what capacity. Then you can look up suitable organizations.

Think about the costs and where the money could go. Like Sarah suggested, could you use your $1,500 in a way that could benefit the community more? Make sure that you are choosing programs run by responsible organizations that are operating in close collaboration with the communities they are supposed to represent.

As a general rule, programs run by grassroots non-profit organizations are more locally consultative, as opposed to religious or for-profit ones. Alternatively, applying for more skilled positions through organizations such as Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development and Australian Volunteers International will ensure that you are involved in long term programs which have been structured according to community needs. If you are interested about voluntourism you can always contact justfocus.org.nz.

Jeff ‘free’ Luers, currently serving a 22 year 8 month sentence in Oregon, USA, is one of these Eco-prisoners. On June 26th 2000 he decided to take part in “an act of resistance designated to raise awareness and draw attention to a problem that affects every human being, every animal, every plant, and every form of life on this planet. I am speaking of global warming air, soil and water pollution” 1

    Luers torched three SUVs at a Chevrolet dealership. The damage to the SUVs was so slight that they were later repaired and sold. Luers’ harsh sentence was entirely political. His support website has a large list comparing his sentence with those handed down to people convicted of shocking crimes, such as murder and rape. One man, who had previously served time for murder, was convicted, of raping several young girls and sentenced to 13 years prison by Karen Tracey, the same prosecutor in Luers’ case. On the 14th of February 2007 the Oregon Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that Jeff Luers will be remanded back to court for re-sentencing. Hopefully his sentence will be shortened. To keep informed about this see Jeff Luers’ website below.

Since the election of the Bush Administration there has been growing repression of radical ecological and animal rights activists. In 2002 the FBI declared the ‘Earth Liberation Front’ (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front’ (ALF) the nation’s biggest domestic terror threats, despite the fact that they’ve never hurt people. Many activists have been arrested and imprisoned for frivolous reasons, in what is being described as ‘the green scare’. You might be interested in reading more about voluntourism statistics.

Across the majority world large numbers of people have been imprisoned for daring to stand up to multinationals destroying the environment. In West Papua, which has been the scene of violent Indonesian Military operations since 1962, there has been large scale repression against students protesting the operations of US mining company Freeport McMoRan. Every day Freeport’s Grasberg copper and gold mine dumps 700,000 tonnes of mining waste into Papua’s rivers. According to the New York Times this has destroyed nearly 90 square miles of wetlands, which were once ‘one of richest freshwater habitats in the World’. This has angered many indigenous West Papuans, so Freeport pays the Indonesian Military to provide security. The Military has murdered many mining opponents.

On March 16th 2006 university students set up blockades in Papua’s capital, Jayapura, demanding the closure of the Freeport mine. The Military and Brimob (paramilitary police) violently attacked the demonstrators, leading to clashes in which three policemen and one soldier died. Brimob entered the university arresting scores of students, who were then beaten, tortured and forced to admit to taking part in the killings. Students’ families were also targeted. One student, who has since fled to Papua New Guinea, told an Australian human rights activist “After the March 16 clashes Intel [Brimob] arrested my mother, then took her from the house to the university. They wanted to kill her in front of the university but she was struggling and shouting hard, and so they took her to POLDA [Police Station] and tortured her, burned her with cigarettes and beat her up for three days at the gaol”.2 Some of the students have since been given lengthy prison terms, even though no evidence to suggest they took part in the killings was produced. Hundreds are still in hiding. Find out more about the best voluntourism organizations.

The New Zealand Government have been accused of not doing enough to expose the crisis in West Papua and could be seen as complicit in the destruction of West Papua. The NZ Super Fund invests taxpayer money in Freeport McMoRan. On May 14th 2007 an Indonesian Military officer started a 7 month NZ Defense Force Command Staff course at Trentham Army Camp, near Wellington. During the occupation of East Timor, Indonesian soldiers used to learn ‘counter-insurgency’ skills from the NZ Defense Force. Human rights activists have called for NZ not to repeat the mistakes of the past by cutting all NZ military ties with Indonesia.

As young people we need to ask ourselves do we aspire to join the big corporations and governments destroying our world or will we stand in solidarity with Jeff Luers, the Papuan students and all those bravely resisting the destruction of our planet?

Kia mau ra, kia mau ra
Hold fast, hold fast 
Ki te mana motuhake me te aroha.
To self-determination and to love.
Kia mau ra, kia mau ra
Hold fast, hold fast
Ki te mana motuhake me te aroha.
To self-determination and to love.

Ngā iwi e. The song of the Pacific. Originally a Kanaky song from New Caledonia, it was translated into Maori in the 1970s and entered New Zealand by way of Greenpeace, who sung it on board the Rainbow Warrior while protesting French nuclear testing at Muroroa in French Polynesia. It is as Pacific as the wide blue ocean in which we all live.

On the last night of the inaugural Pacific Youth Festivalheld in Tahiti between 17 and 22 July, it was revived as ninety New Caledonians cheered the end of the festival and sung for a new day in the fight for self-determination in the Pacific. They sang for freedom, their banner bearing the words “Delegation of New Caledonia” (a reminder to the festival of their refusal to march under the French flag). The song, echoing in the outdoor stadium as the sun went down over the harbor of Pape’ete, and the warm Pacific wind stirred the Kanaky flags they carried in their hands and wore around their necks. Follow this link and find out all the  voluntourism opportunities you might have.

I was lucky enough to be there in the stadium with them. Part of the 17-person delegation from Aotearoa who had traveled across the ocean to be part of the festival, I had joined with the more than 1000 youth from across the Pacific to discuss the important issues of the region. Sustainable Development, globalization, active citizenship, peace, health. education, equality, cultural diversity, good governance. An array of problems and challenges was presented to us in six days of workshops and conferences designed to educate, empower and engage Pacific youth. 1400 Pacific youth gathered together to share, experience and learn. There were anti-corruption activists from Papua New Guinea, democracy advocates from the Solomon Islands, human rights workers from New Caledonia, sustainable farmers from Tonga, HIV/AIDS educators from the Kiribati Islands, indigenous intellectual property lawyers from Australia, women’s group organizers from Fiji, sports coaches from Vanuatu, community artists from the Norfolk islands and the list goes on. Too many to meet in a week, let alone to list here.

By the time I left Tahiti, the festival had become a backdrop to something much more serious. Behind the dancers on the cultural stage and the palm trees and the workshops and conferences was being played out an event that may well shape the future of French Polynesia’s future. Looking back on it now it seems bizarre, how Charmaine Clark, (Ngati Kahungunu), a researcher from the Tairawhiti Polytechnic in Gisborne and I got caught up in the middle of the struggle for self-determination in Tahiti.

It began on Monday morning at the opening ceremony when Oscar Temaru, leader of Tahiti’s biggest independence political party and French Polynesia’s coalition government, asked the festival “to consider the issue of independence and more specifically ‘the freedom of the Maohi [Tahitian] people’”. He also said to the Festival in English, “Do you know that in our local Assembly it is prohibited to speak our language, the language of our land? Here [at the festival] we will speak our mother tongue. This is only one example of the colonial system that still exists in our land. We want to get rid of colonialism, racism and all these wrongs that exist everywhere in the world.” At that point, the French High Commissioner Office’s secretary-general walked out of the festival. The first shot of a new battle in an old war had been fired.

To explain; French Polynesia is an “overseas country” of France. It exists as a sort of autonomous colony, caught in the limbo of a people who want decolonization and France which is desperate to hold onto its old colonial outposts in the Pacific. France still controls the immigration, foreign affairs and funds much of the social services in French Polynesia, and many in French Polynesia fear that the economy would collapse without French support. However, there is a tension between those who feel that it’s time for the nation to become independent and those who want the islands to remain connected with France. Oscar Temaru is the fiery independence leader who, when asked by a reporter “Most people call this place French Polynesia. What do you call it?” replied, “This is French-occupied Polynesia. That is the truth. This country has been occupied.” He has been involved in the struggle for self-determination for a long time and is an old friend of Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a Kanaky independence fighter assassinated in 1988 by the French and whose son, Pascal, was also attending the festival.

Then, on Monday afternoon, I went with Charmaine, the Aotearoa Junior Delegate’, to watch her and the other Pacific Junior Delegates’ begin drafting the Pacific Youth Charter. It was a shambles. The French Polynesian Junior Delegate’ had appointed himself the chair of the drafting committee and next to him was the delegate from France. Yes, you read correctly: France was part of the festival. Three or four young people from a Paris youth NGO had come to the festival to represent the multimillion-dollar stake that France had in the festival, but it seemed to me, in the Tahitian cultural center, watching the French delegate dominate proceedings that something was truly wrong for them to be able to put themselves on the drafting committee for the PACIFIC Youth charter.

On Wednesday the plot thickened, when Oscar Temaru invited the delegates for cocktails at parliament. The French and French Polynesian delegates (by the way the French Polynesian delegate seemed to have colonial outposts in his head) strongly argued that the delegates not go to the cocktails because it would cut into the drafting time for the charter. After a vote, which was eleven votes to ten in favour of not going (the deciding vote being the French), Charmaine and five other delegates walked out of the drafting committee, stating that it was rude to ignore an invitation by the President when they had not ignored a invitation the previous night by the French High Commissioner. At the party Charmaine invited Temaru to a forum that she and I had hastily organized the day before and scheduled for Saturday morning. It was to be a forum on “Decolonization with Justice”, the very topic that Temaru had wanted discussed at the Forum. Although Temaru was to be outside the country, he promised to send his representative.

On Thursday it was voted that the French delegate could not have voting powers in the committee, causing him to walk out stating that it was “disrespectful” for Pacific youth to refuse the old colonial nations a say in their, (our) future. The youth of the Pacific had struck a blow against the empire it seemed.

On Saturday morning Charmaine and I prepared the hall for the around one hundred youth and interested observers, including two members of the French Polynesian Assembly, who came to discuss colonization and decolonization. It turned into a very successful forum and we were able to put colonisation back on the agenda of the festival. Samoans came to talk about their dark past at the hands of colonial New Zealand; Kanaky, Maohi, Cook Islanders, Palauans came to discuss their islands’ experiences; Australians came to vent their frustration that there was only one aboriginal in their delegation, Papua New Guineans remembered their brothers and sisters in West Papua, who the government had warned them not to talk about at the Youth Festival. The pain of the Pacific peoples flowed through the room, the hurt, frustration and anger at last beginning to be discussed in an open way instead of being swept under the rug. Read about the voluntourism pros and cons and Just Focus.

That night Charmaine and I met with the deputy of Temaru’s political party, Jean-Michel Carlson, and his wife to talk about the forum and the way the festival was unfolding. Jean-Michel informed us that the festival was part of a pro-French agenda initiated when Temaru was temporarily out of office after the more pro-French opposition party contested elections. No wonder France was allowed to take part in drafting the charter and why indigenous issues and colonization were avoided. The whole festival had been initiated as a way of legitimizing the French presence in the Pacific.

Regardless of this, the Pacific Youth Festival was an important step forward for addressing issues in the Pacific region and facilitating dialogue between Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian and colonial settler cultures. However, I would definitely be critical of aspects of the festival such as the large Pacific Plan delegation, which held workshops on its development program (a plan that most Pacific NGOs say, “ignores the real needs of the region.”) Workshops on indigenous cultural protection, disabled peoples rights, gender equality, over fishing and poverty highlighted the inspiring work being undertaken by Pacific youth. Being with Maohi and learning about life in French Polynesia was a real experience. For instance, learning about the new golf course that was being created against local people’s wishes on the island of Mo’orea seemed to be an analogy of the whole Pacific situation with tourism: white people monopolising land and resources so they could indulge in recreation, while being served by a new underclass of workers forced to work in the tourism industry because all other industry is underdeveloped.

By the time I got on the plane home to New Zealand I was feeling much more like a citizen of the Pacific Ocean than ever before. The festival had made me realise how dependent Pacific peoples are on activists and campaigners in the “big brother” nations of Aotearoa and Australia to protest and lobby for increased foreign aid, fair trade rules, action on climate change and protection from the nuclear arms and colonial armies of the world’s superpowers. Whether it’s colonization in West Papua, nuclear testing in Muroroa, unfair trade rules at the World Trade Organization or greenhouse gases from the industrial nations, Pacific issues are Aotearoa’s issues and that to ignore our brothers and sisters in the Pacific is to deny the true fact of human existence: the fact that ultimately we’re all in this one together.

Under NAFTA, all three nations had to drop their restrictions on agricultural imports. Subsidies to small farmers had to be dropped, but the US government was still allowed to give multi-billion dollar subsidies to giant agri-business corporations, such as Cargill, ADM and Conagra. It is not surprising that these corporations lobbied hard for NAFTA.

Small US farmers, who were not subsidised, found it impossible to compete with these corporations. Between 1995 and 2002, the US lost 38,310 small farms. NAFTA and its precursor, the US Canada Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), have had a similar effect on Canadian rural communities. Between 1996 and 2001, Canada lost 11 percent of its family farms. Meanwhile, US agri-business corporations have used the agreements to consolidate their control of the Canadian agricultural market. Canada’s largest farming co-ops Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba and United Grain Growers have all been taken over by Agricore United, of which ADM has a large shareholding.

NAFTA has had an even worse effect on rural communities in Mexico. The Mexican market was flooded with subsidized US corn and maize imports, which were dumped at a price less than what it would cost a Mexican farmer to produce. As a result, an estimated 1.5 million Mexicans farmers have been forced off the land. These farmers then have to travel into the cities to compete for an ever decreasing amount of jobs with poor pay and conditions or make the dangerous (usually illegal) journey across the US border.

The process of small ‘inefficient’ farms being out-competed by large ‘efficient’ agribusiness corporations was supposed to make food cheaper for consumers. However, in all three NAFTA nations the price of basic foodstuffs has increased. In Mexico, the price paid to farmers for their produce has dropped by 70 percent, but the price of the nation’s staple food, corn tortillas, has increased by 50 percent in Mexico City and even higher in rural areas. Figures put out by the US Census Bureau showed that the Consumer Price Index (real prices for food eaten at home in the US) rose by 22 percent between 1994 and 2002.

Maize was first domesticated by indigenous Mexicans 9000 years ago. Over 41 distinct varieties of corn are grown in Mexico. This biodiversity is being lost as agribusiness corporations replace diverse plots with monocultures.

In order to sign up to NAFTA, Mexico’s then President Salinas removed Article 27 from Mexico’s Constitution. Article 27 dates from Mexico’s post revolutionary constitution of 1917. It broke up the Hacienda system under which large areas of land were owned by a few absentee landlords, forcing thousands of campesinos (peasants) into starvation or to become debt slaves to the landlords. The broken up tracts of land were to be turned into ejidos, which are communal farms run by campesinos in poor communities.

To many campesinos, especially the indigenous people of Mexico’s poorest state, Chiapas, the repeal of Article 27 destroyed any chance they’d ever have to farm their own land. Ejidos could now be privatized. To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), an organization set up to fight for the rights of indigenous people this was the final straw. Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista’s poetic, ski masked, pipe smoking spokesman, declared NAFTA to be “a death certificate for the Indian peoples of Mexico”. The Zapatistas chose the 1st of January 1994 as the day of their uprising to coincide with the introduction of NAFTA.

Zapatistas, armed with wooden rifles, pitch forks, the odd assault rifle and machetes briefly occupied several cities and towns in Chiapas before the Mexican military launched a brutal crackdown. Villages sympathetic to the Zapatistas were bombed and at least 150 people died in fighting between the Zapatistas and the military. The 60,000 Mexican troops in Chiapas, backed by paramilitaries, continue to attack innocent civilians in a campaign of ‘low intensity warfare’ to this day.

The flood of rural people forced off the land coming to Mexico’s cities, coupled with the large scale unemployment caused by the NAFTA related privatization of state assets, made wages and conditions in factories worse. Maquiladoras, large areas of factories dedicated to producing goods for export, proliferated along the US border. David Bacon, the author of the book The Children ofNAFTA states that in Torreon “It takes 1500 pesos a week to provide for a family of four. A normal maquiladora worker makes about 320 – 350 pesos”. This means young children have to leave school to find work just so their families can afford basic necessities.

In 1999 the Border Committee of Woman Workers in Mexico reported that since 1994 manufacturing wages had fallen by 20 percent according to official figures. Furthermore, a study by the Economics Faculty of the Autonomous University of Mexico found that Mexican salaries have lost 81 percent of their buying power in the last 20 years.

Following NAFTA, many US and Canadian firms took advantage of the poor working conditions in Mexico by outsourcing their production to save on labour costs. To encourage more foreign investment, the Mexican government and owners of maquiladoras have kept wages low and conditions poor. If workers ask for better pay they’re threatened that their companies will move their jobs overseas.

One of the most controversial parts of NAFTA is the investor dispute settlement process in Chapter 11 of the agreement, which allows foreign investors to sue governments. Chapter 11 has been used at least 30 times by multinational corporations to sue governments which have made environmental and workers’ rights legislation deemed to be bad for profits.

In August 2000, the Mexican government was ordered to pay US 16.7 million dollars to the California based Metalclad Corporation. Metalclad had been denied a permit to open a hazardous waste treatment and disposal site by the provincial government of San Luis Potosi. Under the hazardous waste site was a stream which provided water to the local community. In order to protect public safety, the provincial government turned the area into an ecological reserve. Under NAFTA’s rules this was considered an ‘expropriation of Metalclad’s potential earnings’.

justfocus.org.nz will keep you updated about different kind of news about the best voluntourism organizations. Instead of lifting all boats, NAFTA has made a small elite extremely wealthy while making the majority of the people of Mexico, Canada and the USA considerably worse off.