Tourism as theatre

“Tourism is perhaps best described as a theatrical production in which the tourists become the audience, the destination becomes the set, and the natives become the actors. In general, the tourist goes to a destination to witness the enactment of another culture, either domestic or foreign.” So said Kurt Cobb of Resource Insights, in his ‘Confessions of a tourist in an energy-challenged age’ (Cobb, Kurt,  October 15^th 2006, http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2006/10/confessions-of-tourist-in-energy.html).

One tourist, perhaps in the guise of an anthropologist living for months or years with a remote tribe, may not make a colossal difference to the tribal way of life, although the very presence of an observer from ‘outside’ changes the context of daily life. When there are more tourists than locals, though, the visitors become the ‘actors’ and the natives become the ‘producers’, the facilitators of the event. The play the visitors have gone to see no longer exists and, instead, they are acting out their own fantasies amidst strange scenery. In Kurt Cobb’s view:

“When the number of tourists increases, certain natives find it profitable to cater to the desires of tourists. These natives, in effect, become the ushers of the theatre and become aligned with the tourists. When the number of tourists overwhelms a particular locale, the performance suffers. This happens when, for instance, those sitting next to the tourists in restaurants are other tourists.”

The locals who minister to the tourist throng inevitably move away from their previous culture, a change process that often breeds conscious and unconscious resentment as “[t]he natives resent being reduced to a servant class whose job is to provide a caricature of their culture consistent with the fantasies of the tourists” (Cobb, as above).

Film-set tourism is the packaging, for sale, of exotic locations, exciting environments, even picturesque poverty. One day in a recent autumn,  I was riding a pony called Margareina over rocky terrain in a national park in Cuba, accompanied by a guide for whom people like me represented economic survival. In my mind I was on a set for a cowboys-and-Indians western film, imagining a hold-up over the brow of the next hill, transported back to my rural childhood where my pony-riding friends and I had often played cowboys and Indians, although in the less authentic setting of the green fields of rural Britain.

Margareina and me: riding in Trinidad.

The ghost culture in my mind had nothing to do with Cuba, illustrating Cobb’s point that tourist destinations are stages for the enactment of the traveller’s own fantasies, with two sets of actors, the tourists and those who provide for them, each with their own agendas. When the visitors are wealthy and the locals have become their servants, communications between them are somewhat corrupted. This process is particularly obvious in Cuba, where the Communist Party opposes the accumulation of wealth in private hands, while at the same time relying on hard currency from affluent tourists to shore up the economy against total collapse. The Communist Party does what it can to impede connections between Cubans and foreigners, to the extent of criminalising friendships as prostitution. Rebecca, a recently retired Canadian divorcee who rented a couple of rooms in the town of Sancti Spiritus that she had turned into a small self-contained apartment in which to escape from the Canadian winter, told me that she had shared it with a Cuban man. He risked arrest for prostitution, so they managed to obtain a permit for them both to be resident in the apartment, thinking this would overcome the problem. “He was still arrested,” said Rebecca, “and sentenced to four years in prison for anti-socialist activities.”

In Cuba, the theatre staff – the citizens — are there to take the audience’s money for the proprietor, i.e. the government, not to fraternise nor, according to communist philosophy, to profit individually. This was the backdrop to  two months that I spent in Cuba in 2006.  Had I been working in Cuba, or living there permanently, I could well have come away with different impressions, but as a tourist I was an economic resource, there to contribute hard currency, nothing more. Tourists are usually regarded as sources of income, all over the world, but in Cuba I was particularly conscious of being the equivalent of a cash dispenser.

Tourists’ cash is desperately needed. Marisa taught me Spanish in Santiago de Cuba, the bustling if dilapidated stage set of the second city, on the east coast.  Her grandparents, like Fidel Castro’s parents, had emigrated from Galicia in north-west Spain. She lived with her engineer husband, her daughter and son-in-law, both doctors, and toddler granddaughter in a two-bedroom flat on the middle floor of a nondescript, unmodernised five-story block, six or seven kilometres from the city centre. Marisa relied on public transport, which was overcrowded and unreliable. “I need to leave home at least two hours before I start work in the city,” she said, “and it takes me another two hours to get home again.” The pesos convertibles (hard currency) with which I paid for lessons helped the family a little, but could not overcome the stresses of living in a crowded flat, travelling on crammed buses, trying to find medicines, trying to vary the beans and rice diet a little, lacking time and money to enjoy any hobbies. If Marisa did not work with foreigners like myself, the family would be struggling to survive. The more unofficial the transaction, the better it is for the entrepreneur, because state-sanctioned private enterprise for tourists is taxed ferociously. The Cubans who opt out of the state structure, as far as they can, and live off the tourists, are acting rationally in their own economic interests, although in the long term, the tourism industry will suffer if visitors feel too harried and threatened by hustlers.

The police force is fundamental to the maintenance of safe strolling areas for tourists.  I wondered how the state manages to pay all the police, who  seemed to have smart new uniforms, and arms. Wandering one afternoon in Santiago, I noticed lots of police patrolling at crossroads and two policemen, armed with what looked like sub-machine guns, were standing guard outside the Hotel Casa Granda, the most upmarket place to stay in central Santiago. In Havana the presence of law enforcers was even more overwhelming: I seemed to see a policeman every few seconds as I walked around the old city, Habana Vieja.

One day in Santiago, in the Casa de Té near the town hall, a tall man of past African origin, like the majority of Santiagueros, leapt in and sat down at my table. He said his name was Angelo, and told the waitress to bring him a beer. This is a good wheeze, because when he had drunk it, and had realised I was not about to go with him to listen to a band/ buy CDs he stood up and walked out, leaving me with the bill. He was replaced by an elderly woman who came and asked me for money and soap. Angelo, who I think was in his early 20s, had let me ask him a few questions, on the understanding that knowledge is a tradable commodity. He said he lived with his parents and brother in the Tivoli district. The conversation, in translation, went something like this:

Me: “What work do you do, Angelo?”

Angelo: “I promote Cuban music. Would you like to come and listen to a really good group?”

Me: “Well not today, thank you Angelo, I’ve got to go to my Spanish class in a minute.”

Angelo: “I’ve got some CDs as well, really cheap.”

Me: “Sorry Angelo, I haven’t really got room in my luggage.”

Angelo: “I can take you to a good restaurant, you can have lobster.” (Few Cubans get the chance to eat lobster legally, because by law it is available in state-owned restaurants only.)

Me: “Thank you Angelo but I’ve already asked for a meal at the house where I’m staying.”

— Angelo was now deciding that I’m a dead loss.

Me: “What’s life like in Santiago?”

Angelo: “There isn’t enough food, especially meat. Hardly any meat. Here in Santiago I’m sure we are worse off than people in Havana.”

Me: “I think some big celebrations are coming, I’ve seen notices around the city. Are you looking forward to them?

— Angelo snorted.

Angelo: “There’ll be police all over the place, lifting people off the street.”

Me: “Surely not?”

Angelo: “Yes there will, it happens. No, I’m not looking forward,  there’s not much to celebrate.”

Quite probably, Angelo was not an ace member of the Communist Party, but I met many loyal and highly qualified Cubans like Marisa who highlighted the important health and educational achievements of the Communist regime since the Revolution in 1959, but who moonlighted doing mundane jobs like teaching me elementary Spanish, for the hard curency I would provide. Currency is a critical problem in Cuba, of which more another time.

When university lecturers  teach elementary Spanish to  tourists, doctors become taxi drivers, and pharmacists run bed-and-breakfasts, how much are the tourists undermining the medical and educational achievements of the Revolution, while at the same time providing income flows that enable the state’s Communist structures to survive? Quite a paradox, I thought.

If the tourists are the paying audience in the theatre that is Cuba, and the local population are the theatre staff, selling them snacks,  ice creams, translations, and taxi rides after the show, then what, I wondered, is the show intended to be? The tourists in the audience are watching the staff, the staff are watching the audience: perhaps the stage itself is empty, and any performances (apart from those imagined in individuals’ heads) are films from the historical archive.

Yes, a new curriculum in Wales for students aged 14 to 19, with wider choices and vocational options, is a good idea. No one wants a school full of bored, disaffected teenagers, whose lack of qualifications narrows their life choices.

Unfortunately this new curriculum, requiring 14-year-olds to have a choice of at least five vocational diplomas from a list of 14, is being introduced when the UK government has run out of money to fund the changes – and the costs in rural areas without a public transport infrastructure will be horrendous.

Small secondary schools do not have the resources to offer all these courses. In my part of rural Carmarthenshire the county council, responsible for education, wants to close two secondary schools and replace them with one super school, to be funded (they hope) by the Welsh Assembly Government.

The proposed super school would be built on the flood plain of a river that often floods, and which is (according to environmental adviser Tony Jukes) likely to change course towards the new campus. The two closed schools would have to be used (as what??) or demolished, otherwise they would become health hazards and eyesores. Lots of money has been spent on both schools in recent years, all wasted if the buildings are knocked down.

Let’s think of the students. The new site is close to the larger of the redundant schools, but over 12 miles from the smaller, with road access through the congested, narrow main street of a small town, a street that is a notorious bottleneck. The smaller school, serving a hilly, sparsely populated area, has a large catchment area of its own, extending for up to 10 miles or so, so that many pupils would have one-way journeys of 20 miles or more, on winding country roads, to the so-called super school. There is no public transport over most of this area, so pupils would have to rely on special school buses. How sustainable is that, when we are trying to reduce carbon emissions and face declining oil supplies?

What would happen in winter when roads are impassable due to snow and ice?  When floods close the roads? When pupils want to stay for after-school activities but can’t, because there is no bus and they can’t walk all those miles home? What about behaviour on the buses? Children on school buses for hours every day will be bored and sometimes rowdy. Will two or three hours daily on a bus be a beneficial use of their time? I think not.

There are other options. Shropshire, also a rural county, over the border in England –  where similar 14-19 reforms are in progress –  is adopting distance learning technologies to enable small schools to stay open. In my area, distance learning, peripatetic teachers, practical education aided by local small and medium sized businesses, and collaboration with a nearby and well-equipped independent school, could together ensure rich educational opportunities for the area’s children. However, it will take a huge community effort to prevent the council from wasting millions of pounds on a new white elephant, a super school on the flood plain of a capricious river.

Protest annoys the council, but as Thomas Jefferson, third president of the USA, pointed out so memorably: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”.

George Osborne’s ‘Emergency Budget’ on June 22nd 2010 quite impressed me at first.  We can earn another £1,000 before paying Income Tax, food and children’s clothes remain exempt from VAT and so are outside the coming hike from 17.5% to 20%, and the state pension will not be cut. The rise in Capital Gains Tax from 18% to 28% will apply only to those who pay Income Tax above the basic rate, i.e. a small minority.

After chewing it over for a few days, I am less and less convinced. The idea is to force the UK economy into a dramatic shift, away from dependence on consumer spending and towards a shiny, high-tech exporting economy on the German model. The unanswered questions include:

What are we going to make??

The World Trade Organisation allows us (big of them) to protect industries vital to national security. That means arms. We have protected our arms industries, which are modern and efficient. Are we going to ramp up arms exports? That will make the world a safer place!

Who is going to buy our exports??

Dictators anxious to bolster their armed forces to stay in power?

The whole of the Eurozone is suffering from the financial wobbles caused by Greece, Spain, Ireland and, probably quite soon, Italy.  Eurozone countries are not going to import more stuff from the UK. The Chinese government is awash with dollars, but while it may be interested in highly specialised exports, China will not want mass freight from the British Isles. Your ideas are welcome.

Who is going to finance the re-industrialisation of the UK?

The banks aren’t interested, as opportunities for big profits would be slim. If the government had a mind to make Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which it controls, serve primarily the national interest, it might be a different story. But the plan is to sell the state’s holdings in RBS, Lloyds Banking Group and Northern Rock back to the private sector, when the time seems right.

Are taxpayers going to stump up the cash? No chance, our higher taxes are destined to help plug the chasm between our government’s income and its expenditure.

Are we expecting transnational corporations to build new factories here? Why should they, when Vietnam, Brazil et.al. look more enticing, and have cheaper workers.

Of course, the mass unemployment likely to result from the coming slash and burn approach to public spending would force wages down, and thus Income Tax revenues would suffer too. The phased reduction in Corporation Tax announced in the Budget, from 28% to 24% over four years, and intended to attract businesses, will create long-term jobs only if there is an expanded market for the UK’s products and services (and let’s not stake our future on casino banking).

It looks to me as though this could be a disastrously Thatcherite budget, not that surprising as George Osborne is a Tory chancellor, although I think the sops to the Liberal Democrat coalition partners have, to an extent, disguised the coming pain. This ‘Emergency Budget’ had scarcely anything to say about mitigating climate change, or encouraging co-operative and not-for-profit ventures to help local people meet their own needs,  or facing up to Peak Oil and the inevitable limits to growth.

Bad luck, LibDems. You recognise these issues, but your voice was not strong enough.

Risk and Responsibilities

Thoughts on the Deepwater Horizon explosion

Deepwater Horizon, the semi-submersible drilling rig now on the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico, gained the world record for deep-water drilling with the discovery, in 2009, of the Tiber reservoir holding perhaps 3 billion barrels of oil, perhaps more: oil reserve calculations are notoriously fragile even for terrestrial fields. The Tiber find is in the Gulf of Mexico, and it is 35,056 feet below the surface of the ocean, 30,926 feet under the ocean floor. The oil is 6.64 miles below the sea surface.

The Deepwater Horizon moved on to drill elsewhere in the Gulf, to the Mississippi Canyon Block 252, 45 miles south of the Louisiana coast. Drilling began in February 2010, and by the time the rig exploded on April 20^th, had reached almost 13,000 feet below the ocean floor after traversing 5,023 feet of water, in all 3.41 miles down. BP holds the operating licence for Block 252 and is thus where the responsibility buck stops.

While wires are buzzing with accounts of how the well ruptured, causing the fireball that destroyed Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 workers on it, and news stories have concentrated on the consequential damage to the wetlands of the Mississippi delta, and to the fate of the inhabitants who rely on fishing, tourism and jobs in the oil industry, the issues underlying the disaster have so far received less attention.

I would like to start with this question:

Why did BP and its partners and contractors accept the risks of drilling so deep in such dangerous and unpredictable conditions?

Surely deep-water drilling, to world record levels in the Gulf, tells us that the most accessible oil has already gone or is in fields already known and pumping busily. It is a warning that we are going to run out of oil that can be drilled with risks that have, by and large until now, been acceptable to local populations or, at least, to their leaders.

Deep-water drilling is so complicated and expensive that operators have to involve financial partners and numerous specialist contractors, thus creating large numbers of communications points at which errors can enter the management systems. Yet currently oil companies working in US territories do not have to worry too much about catastrophic accidents at off-shore wells, as long as they do not result from criminal activity, because liability is capped at $75 million. This is peanuts for global oil.

BP may have thought it had all bases covered from its own commercial perspective, through insurance and derivative contracts, which appear to be more important in the oil business than the safety of people, wildlife and the livelihoods of ‘small people’ as BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg called them, who work in oil-damaged areas.

The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe may lead to the US imposing a higher restitution cap, provided the administration can be sure this would not reduce oil exploration. If the risks of drilling in US jurisdictions become more expensive – because risk is seen commercially only in financial terms, not as lives lost or habitats destroyed – then the oil companies will concentrate more on territories like Nigeria, where corruption and graft are endemic, and the ‘small people’ can’t afford top international lawyers.

It appears to me that BP was drilling in the Gulf because the directors felt they had covered the risks financially, and they knew there was a $75m limit on damages. Small change: it cost nearly two and half times that amount to lease the Deepwater Horizon for a year. No wonder that BP chief executive Tony Hayward, appearing before a US congressional committee, seemed to know so little about his company’s activities in the Gulf. Of course, his ‘don‘t knows’ may have been the result of legal advice as well as from ignorance, but they broadcast the message that the chief executive is above technical issues such as the hazards of deep-water drilling, because the costs of a disaster do not (normally) matter that much. Nothing special about BP here: transnational corporations are inclined to treat risk as a series of financial offsets.

Ethics and big oil are not exactly bedfellows, but for the sake of the planet President Obama’s pressure on BP should set the example for all governments whose people and lands are devastated by oil companies’ activities. He might have given his anger an anti-British spin to distance himself from the fact that BP is a multinational in which 39% of the shares are in American hands, just one percentage point fewer than the 40% in British hands, and that the largest single shareholder at December 31^st 2009 was New York-based investment group BlackRock Inc, which held 5.93% of the voting rights. OK, Obama was not setting an example of impartial criticism, but it’s a start, and he got BP to promise $20bn for a compensation fund.

The president’s fury will amount to little, though, unless he can ensure that the US reduces oil consumption substantially, but it seems to me that the economy is far too oil-dependent and inter-dependent for that to happen until enforced by declining supplies. The specialist world of deep-sea drilling illustrates the webs of connections that make change so difficult. The drilling rig Deepwater Horizon was constructed by Hyundai Heavy Industries in Ulsan, South Korea, for Transocean Inc, which is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. Transocean paid $560m for the rig and flagged it in the Marshall Islands, where the regulatory and inspection regimes are, shall we say, less rigorous than in the USA. BP leased the rig in 2008, and in 2009 extended the lease to 2013, at a cost of $496,800 per day, according to Wikipedia. The rig was drilling an exploration well named Macondo, a venture in BP was the lead investor but had two partners: Anadarko Petroleum Corporation of Houston, Texas, which owns a 25% share, and Mitsui Oil Exploration Co, 70% owned by Mitsui and Co of Japan, which has a 10% stake.

BP, the operator, contracted with several other companies to supply equipment and expertise in the drilling of Macondo. Cameron, of Houston, supplied the blow out prevention system which allegedly failed to stop the burst. Halliburton, also based in Houston, cemented the well and was to have put in the cement plug, but the blow out intervened. Schlumberger, which has principal offices in Houston, Paris and The Hague, provided technical expertise and testing. Apparently the cement bond log test should have been run shortly before the explosion, but allegedly the senior BP staffer on the rig opted to bypass the test and also, allegedly, refused Schlumberger’s advice to shut in the well as fast as possible. Schlumberger’s personnel left the rig by helicopter six hours before the explosion. There were other contractors, too, I imagine all equally keen to protect their reputations.

Seeing this complex global network of contracts made me wonder if BP’s directors had kept a close enough watch on the company’s riskiest operations. There is a special board committee, the safety, ethics and environment assurance committee, SEEAC, but although a check of the members revealed a wealth of business experience, there are gaps too. The five members named in BP’s annual report and accounts for 2009, average age 61, have worked in mining, the food industry, defence, health, transport, and the supply of electricity and gas, rather than in oil exploration and extraction, and even more to the point, they have other directorships and so are strictly part-time scrutineers. Would it really have been possible for them to ensure that BP operated responsibly, with ethics to the fore?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that BP has become so complex and so dependent on contractors that the directors are far removed from the issues affecting the real work of finding and extracting energy. That work has become so risky, and so susceptible to major disaster, that the BP corporate model is no longer fit for purpose.

Could this also apply to the other major oil corporations — ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron Corporation, ConocoPhillips and Total? If so, what are we, as citizens of nation states, going to do about it? Are we going to let the oil companies drill in more and more hazardous locations to try and meet our oil addiction, however terrible the collateral damage?

Fizzing fuses in Central Asia

The break-up of the Soviet Union led to a free-for-all in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia

The Caspian Basin oil and gas fields of the former Soviet Union in Central Asia, particularly in the new states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, offer temporary alleviation from oil scarcity. These states are in China’s back yard, not the USA’s, and so the US military engages in a three-way chess game with Russia and China as all three scramble for influence within the region.

Kazakhstan, in particular, in addition to oil has the the world’s second largest uranium reserves, perhaps 817,000 tonnes of the world total of about 5.469m tonnes.  Everyone wants a slice of Kazakhstan – of its oil, gas, coal, uranium, iron ore, chromium, copper, zinc, silver, gold, and other vital components of industrial technology. A large country in the interior of Central Asia, with a population of 15.4 million, Kazakhstan was a republic of the Soviet Union until declaring independence in 1991. There is a religious divide, with rather more Moslems, 47 per cent of the population, than Russian Orthodox Christians, 44 per cent. Kazakhstan is not a western-style ‘democracy’:  President Nursultan A Nazarbayev, first elected in December 1991, has been in power ever since, and was re-elected for a further seven years in December 2005, with a stated 91.5 per cent of the vote. He is an executive president who appoints ministers and makes the big decisions. The Nazarbayev family control uranium, oil and gas, electricity, the rail and postal services, air transport, banks, and more.  Political opposition is not encouraged.

The uranium in Kazakhstan is of intense interest to China. The China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group Company and China National Nuclear Corporation, for example, have made uranium deals with the state-owned nuclear company Kazatomprom. Alarmingly, corruption within Kazakhstan’s nuclear industry is endemic:  the former chief of Kazatomprom, Mukhtar Dzhakishev, went to jail for 14 years in March 2010, for stealing large quantities of uranium and selling it to the highest bidders.

The US had announced in 2004 that was helping Kazakhstan to build a military base to protect the oilfields in the west of the country, and said that joint military training exercises would continue in the future.  NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, signed a liaison agreement with Kazakhstan in October 2005, following the July 2005 decision of Kazakhstan’s southern neighbour, Uzbekistan, to order the US military to vacate its airbase at Karshi-Khanabad within 180 days. This expulsion order, backed by Russia, was followed in September 2005 by joint Russian-Uzbek military exercises, and an order for the American news organisation Internews to quit Uzbekistan. The BBC was ordered out of Uzbekistan the following month.

Oil companies from around the world have significant investments in Kazakh oil fields.   They include Rosneft and Lukoil of Russia; Eni, Shell and Total from Europe; and Chevron and ExxonMobil from the USA. China gained a significant stake in the Kazakh oil industry late in 2005 when China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) bought Petrokazakhstan – which was based in Alberta, Canada – for $4.2 billion. As part of the deal, the Kazakh government (over which the Nazarbayev family has such a hold) received a holding of 33 per cent. A pipeline to carry Kazakh oil to China came into use in December 2005. An earlier pipeline, opened in 2001, takes Kazakh oil west to the Black Sea and Europe.  Many of the oil transactions made in Kazakhstan have been channelled through jurisdictions where secrecy is entrenched, such as Bermuda, and  Switzerland.

The USA and its allies certainly do not have control over Kazakhstan, where Chinese as well as Russian influence is growing rapidly.  The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, including among its members China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, is set on curtailing American influence in Central Asia. In 2009 China lent $10bn to Kazakhstan and bought into the energy company Mangistau Munai Gas.  A coup in Kyrgyzstan in spring 2010 replaced president Kurmanbek Bakiyev with Rosa Otunbayev, whose interim government lost no time in announcing its intention to close the US air base at Manas, north of the capital Bishkek.  The states of  Central Asia, or rather their rulers, are inclined to play the dominant powers off against each other, for material rather than ideological ends.  At the end of January 2010 Kazakhstan, for example, made an appeasing gesture to the US and its allies in NATO by agreeing to allow Afghanistan-bound military flights to cross its airspace, and non-lethal cargoes to cross overland, in return for supplies and training for Kazakh military forces.

With competition hotting up for the oil, gas, uranium and other resources of Central Asia, long periods of political calm and good governance are about as likely as Gordon Brown starting a new career as a stand-up comedian, or Silvio Berlusconi becoming a monk.  It’s probably not a wise move to rely too much on Central Asia for our future fuel and power.

REVISED FROM ‘EMPTY PLATES TOMORROW’, April 11th 2010