Locals Don’t Depend on Tourism. Predatory Tourism Makes Them Do.

Tourism likes to present itself as an economic lifeline. A benevolent industry that “brings jobs,” “injects money,” and “creates opportunities” for local communities. This narrative is repeated so often that it has hardened into common sense. But it is also deeply misleading. In most places that are now framed as “tourism-dependent,” local communities did not organically evolve into that condition. They were pushed there. Dependence on tourism is not a natural economic outcome - it is the result of deliberate structural choices, usually driven by external interests, short-term profit, and a global travel industry that extracts far more than it gives back.

Before becoming destinations, most places were already economically alive. They had agriculture, fishing, crafts, trade networks, local industries, and informal economies that sustained families across generations. These systems were rooted in local knowledge, seasonal rhythms, and community needs. Predatory tourism enters precisely by dismantling these systems - not by force, but by replacement. Land that once produced food becomes accommodation. Homes become short-term rentals. Public space becomes scenery. Labor shifts away from production and into service. What was once an economy with internal logic becomes an economy designed to satisfy external demand.

The mechanism is subtle but brutal. As tourism capital flows in, prices rise - land, rent, food, transportation. Locals are told this is “development,” but their purchasing power does not rise at the same pace. Traditional livelihoods become economically unviable, not because they stop working, but because the cost of staying in place becomes too high. At that point, tourism does not create jobs; it crowds out alternatives. People are forced to abandon self-sustaining activities and sell their labor to the very industry that displaced them. This is not opportunity. It is coercion disguised as choice.

Over time, this shift restructures entire societies. Skills that once ensured autonomy are lost. Younger generations no longer learn how to farm, fish, build, or produce - they learn how to serve. Language, customs, and rituals are flattened into consumable experiences. Local culture stops being lived and starts being performed. And when an economy is organized primarily around pleasing outsiders, it becomes fragile by design. A pandemic, a geopolitical crisis, a trend change, and the entire system collapses. We saw this clearly during COVID, when so-called “tourism-dependent” regions were left without income, food security, or social protection. What collapsed was not the absence of tourists. It was the absence of economic diversity.

A self-sustaining local economy does not reject tourism outright. It places it in its proper role: secondary, complementary, and bounded. In a healthy system, tourism does not dictate land use, housing policy, or labor structures. It adapts to the local economy instead of reshaping it. This means prioritizing housing for residents over short-term rentals, protecting local supply chains, and ensuring that essential services are not priced for visitors but for the people who live there year-round. It means refusing growth models that depend on volume and instead favor slower, smaller, and locally integrated forms of travel.

Crucially, making a place self-sustaining again requires political courage. It requires governments to regulate rather than court tourism capital, to tax extraction properly, and to reinvest in sectors that do not photograph well on Instagram but keep societies functional. It also requires rejecting the comforting lie that “tourism is all we have.” In most cases, it is all that remains after other options were systematically dismantled. Rebuilding those options is difficult, but not impossible - and it is the only path toward real resilience.

The tourism industry often responds to this critique by accusing locals of ingratitude or idealism. But the demand is not for purity or isolation. It is for balance, dignity, and autonomy. Locals do not owe their survival to tourists. Places are not empty stages waiting to be activated by visitors. They are living systems that existed long before they were discovered and will continue to exist long after trends move on - if they are allowed to.

Predatory tourism thrives on dependency because dependency guarantees cheap labor, political silence, and a steady supply of “authentic experiences” stripped of real power. A self-sustaining local economy breaks that cycle. And that, more than anything else, is why it faces so much resistance.