You are here: Home > Campaigns > Past Campaigns > Trekking Wrongs

Trekking Wrongs: Porter’s Rights

Tourism Concern’s campaign on working conditions for porters.

As a result of Tourism Concern's ground-breaking campaign, Trekking Wrongs: Porter's Rights, over half of UK trekking tour operators adopted our code of conduct for improved working conditions for mountain porters. The successes of this campaign have also informed other campaigns and industry codes of conduct.

Frostbite, altitude sickness and even death can be the cost for the porters carrying trekkers' equipment in the Himalayas, on the Inca Trail in Peru and at Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. Tourism Concern's campaign helped to put a stop to the abuse of porters' human rights.

Mountain trekking – it’s exhilarating, it’s beautiful, it’s challenging. But how many of us could do it without the porters who carry our luggage and equipment? Porters are an essential part of treks, but the reality of their working conditions comes as a shock.

Think of Himalayan trekking, and many of us picture the famously hardy sherpas accompanying big-name mountaineers on Everest expeditions. But they also accompany thousands of tourists and while the sherpas are from high altitude areas, most Nepalese porters are poor farmers from lowland areas, and are as unused to the high altitudes and harsh conditions as western trekkers.

Many people don’t know this and a myth seems to have been created that porters are superhuman. The massive weights they carry, the cold and the high altitudes are nothing to them; they’re different.

Unfortunately, this is very inaccurate. In fact, Nepalese porters suffer four times more accidents and illnesses than western trekkers. Making matters worse, there are many reports of porters being abandoned by tour groups when they fall ill. Porters have even been abandoned in life-threatening blizzards while trekkers were rescued by helicopter.

And it’s not just the Himalayas - the problems are repeated worldwide. In the most extreme cases, porters believe they are simply seen as beasts of burden. In the words of a Peruvian porters’ syndicate: "We suffer humiliation upon humiliation, and are treated as less than human." A tour operator in Pakistan is even more direct: the way porters are treated, he says, amounts to modern slavery.

So should people stop trekking? Definitely not - porters need the work.

However, the roots of this problem need to be tackled: the policies and practices of the tour operators who the porters ultimately work for. Until Tourism Concern came in, the majority of UK operators were not yet addressing porters’ rights and working conditions.

What the operators are doing

Tourism Concern believes that fair trade in tourism offers an opportunity for real change and includes UK tour operators addressing the working conditions of their porters. We have worked with the trekking industry and tour operators within the UK – and got results. 41 out of 80 operators now have policies on porters.

Yet more still needs to be done

It is essential that we all continue to ask the right questions when going on a trek to ensure porters and their working conditions do not get left out in the cold. This is done by you – the public.

View our list of ethical tour operators here...