Trouble in Paradise: Costa Rica’s Ecotourism Problem

As capuchin monkeys scurried up palm trees and rainbow-billed toucans soared through the summer breeze, I walked down Manuel Antonio National Park's coveted beach. During my first summer visit to Costa Rica, these were the only moments when I had the beach to myself, so I took a moment to look out at the gentle waves crashing on the beach, a mosaic of turquoise turning orange under the burning sunset.

As the poster child of ecotourism, Costa Rica is home not only to volcanoes, rainforests, beaches, and five percent of the world's biodiversity, but also to a continuous stream of 2.7 million camera-wielding tourists every year. The ecotourism industry on the island is extremely profitable, having generated over 5.5 percent of Costa Rica's gross domestic product (GDP) since 2010. Costa Rica's economy has grown so quickly that, with a GDP of $60.464 billion, it now ranks as the second-largest economy in Central America. On the surface, Costa Rica seems to be a small, welcoming nation whose economic and environmentally-friendly growth should serve as an example to all others.

Yet many experts, policymakers, and researchers often overlook Costa Rica's long list of pressing problems stemming from the very market it depends on. Though the island’s ecotourism industry serves as the bedrock of its economy, it is also the cause of its many internal failures.

First, the ecotourism industry fails to fulfill the important goal of “sustain[ing] the well-being of the local people,” as mandated by the International Ecotourism Society. An example of this is the town of Quepos, home to the same Manuel Antonio National Park—an extremely popular tourist destination that receives roughly 150,000 visits every year. The next day, when a local named Maria Jose Quinteros and I walked down the main streets of Quepos, dodging aggressive tour guides, she described to me how droves of tourists arrive, eager to experience untouched and exotic wonders of nature. Developers wishing to make an easy profit off of foreigners and the land then construct numerous hotels and eco-resorts to cater to their basic needs, often at extravagant prices. The Costa Rican Chamber of Hotels now registers a total of 2,559 hotels throughout the country, with the tourist-popular Central Valley and Guanacaste regions accommodating an overwhelming 68 percent of such construction. Most often, these developers happen to be wealthy foreign investors or large multinational corporations that waste no time acquiring, renovating, and exploiting swathes of land that would otherwise have provided food, shelter, energy, and recreational space for local communities. This competition between mega-resorts and local populations for essential resources almost always ends in the latter’s sound defeat, as foreign investors routinely push indigenous communities out to make room for luxury developments.

An increase in tourists also leads to a higher cost of living in the affected areas, which serves to push locals from their homes at unprecedented rates. According to Trading Economics, the overall cost of food in Costa Rica has increased by 1.84 percent since November 2018. Food price inflation was measured at an average of 5.58 percent from 2007 to 2019. The prices of broccoli, strawberries, beef, cauliflower, and tuna, and medicine in Quepos are highly inflated to match the elevated price range of wealthy tourists. The cost of a basket of food products that met the demands of an average foreign tourist was “82 percent of the average per capita [annual] income of the poorest Costa Ricans” in 2013.

Furthermore, foreign companies often seize opportunities to monopolize the exploitation and manufacture of basic goods on the island. An example of this is Price Club—better known as PriceSmart in Costa Rica—whose operation and construction of exclusive, costly membership clubs largely targets the wealthy elites of Central and South America. The company’s business model is to construct warehouse stores in tourist-popular areas, with its most recent construction being the eighth club in Liberia, Costa Rica. After PriceSmart enters a small town, local businesses are unable to compete with such a large corporation, especially when tourists tend to flock toward these familiar warehouse clubs. The locals, who cannot afford the pricey memberships and thus cannot afford to purchase such goods, go out of business due to falling demand and rising costs.

On a more positive note, the ecotourism industry does provide local jobs for Costa Ricans; the industry employs 19.9 percent of the national workforce. In tourist-popular cities such as Quepos, President Kim Jong Gwan of the Manuel Antonio Hotel San Bada Resort and Spa approximates that the industry is responsible for around 85 percent of local jobs, including careers in reception and gardening. However, major drawbacks follow such job booms. The tourism industry and the jobs themselves are seasonal; the best season to visit Costa Rica is winter or summer. According to Quinteros, hotels and other tourist developments mainly hire locals during the busy seasons. When the number of tourists dramatically declines between those times, hotels immediately fire their workers to save money. The workers could be hired once again after the drought ends, but it is far from guaranteed; steady jobs and steady incomes are a rarity in Quepos. According to the International Monetary Fund, Costa Rica's unemployment rate is forecasted to rise to 11.5 percent in December 2019, a number no doubt driven up by the hire-and-fire practices of the luxury resorts which populate the island.

What remains constant, however, is the great economic inequality driving a wedge between Costa Rican citizens. While wealthy landowners and large tourist corporations become wealthier and wealthier, the locals become poorer and poorer. A glance at the country's extremely high Gini coefficient, a measurement of national wealth inequality, of 0.49 compared to the global average of 0.32, reveals all. An OECD report in 2015 revealed that the average income of the wealthiest 10 percent of households in Costa Rica outranked that of the poorest 10 percent by a factor of 32. The ecotourism industry plays a huge role in encouraging such inequality, as wealthy developers and investors flock to the island to hoard their savings, protect their investments, and exploit the labor of the poorest citizens, all at the expense of Costa Rica’s population and economy.

Ironically, the ecotourism industry destroys the environment that it by definition must conserve to retain its profits. When Quinteros and I finally reached the local and public Espadilla beach, I couldn't help but notice the clear differences between it and the protected Manuel Antonio Park. As young children splashed in the beach’s murky, greasy waves, I noticed a multitude of Coca-Cola cans, gum wrappers, and chip bags scattered across the sand. The harmful effects of constant over-visitation of such beaches and other natural sites are, in effect, uncontrollable. With many national parks receiving up to 200,000 visitors a year, the island government faces real struggles in its attempts to control the rowdy tourists, who themselves are often unaware of their environmental impact on Costa Rica’s fragile biodiversity.

Finally, the rapid development of jungle habitats and the use of beaches as dumping grounds for waste products both account for untold destruction. For example, the University of Costa Rica revealed that Costa Rica lost over half of its beloved monkey population from 1996 to 2008 due to large-scale habitat destruction. Tamarindo, a popular town in the Guanacaste province, experienced heavy rains that overflowed a popular resort's septic tanks, causing tons of raw sewage to spill into the ocean in 2004. The problem continues to this present day, with poor water quality and extreme fecal contamination tainting the once-healthy ocean water.

Though the consequences of the ecotourism industry’s grip on Costa Rica will undoubtedly haunt the nation for quite some time, immediate action can and must be taken to improve its desolate situation. The government should understand that the citizens have a right to the protection of their environment and well-being if the ecotourism industry refuses to step up and do its part in recognizing that right. This includes the passage of strict tourism-centered legislation, such as limits on how many tourists can visit the island at once and on further expansion of hotels and resorts. The end goal of such reform would be to return control of Costa Rica’s environment and economy back to its indigenous citizens.

The reality of picture-perfect Costa Rica is disappointing, to say the very least. The ecotourism industry's contradiction of its own values, seen in its willingness to exchange the livelihood of the local people and the state of the environment for pure profit, is horrifying. Costa Rica must look past its facade of beauty and untouchable nature and acknowledge the truth. A greedy industry is corrupting a tiny, vulnerable nation, and Costa Ricans must regain control of their island before it becomes nothing but a poor, polluted, and corrupt breeding ground for wealthy investors.