The projection by the World Tourism Organization that global tourist arrivals will reach a billion this year signals a dramatic and remarkably quick recovery for an industry that had been hard hit by the global economic crisis. It ought to bring a considerable measure of comfort to the Caribbean. But does it? Even as the WTO was bringing the industry the good news that, globally, international tourist arrivals had grown by 4.4 per cent last year, peaking at around 939 million and that arrivals in the Caribbean had grown by around 4 per cent, an influential voice in the region, the Caribbean Development Bank was cautioning tourism-dependent territories to begin an urgent search for other economic pursuits that could remove or at least reduce that dependency.
Last week, in a blunt expression of concern over the heavy dependence on visitor arrivals by some Caribbean territories, CDB economist Ian Durant said they needed to wake up to the reality of the need to restructure their economies to lessen the blow of external shocks which, given its nature, tourism certainly has the potential to inflict. “Travel is a high-elasticity surface which means that it responds to practically any and every shock,” Durant said, adding that the circumstance speaks to the need to look for “alternative sources” of foreign exchange. “In this economic environment we have heard a lot about restructuring. The relatively weak growth in the region has called for policy makers to look at other areas to generate growth.” From the CDB economist’s perspective it is, for the region, very much “a matter of survival going forward.
Not that the importance of tourism as a money-earner should be overlooked altogether. The sector is directly responsible for 5 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product, 6 per cent of total exports and employs one out of every 12 people in advanced and emerging economies.”
Though the report by the WTO suggests that the numbers in terms of the visitor arrivals look good, the CDB economist wondered aloud as to whether those numbers were being matched by higher spending. After all the region could very well find itself in a situation in the future where more tourists spend less.
A related concern in Durant’s view has to do with whether the tourism sector is truly responsive to the focus of the Caribbean on raising its levels of education and creating suitable job opportunities for a more educated work force. “We need to ensure opportunities are provided for those whom you are educating. A meaningful question that has to be asked is whether these opportunities are being provided in tourism and if not then you need to look at alternatives.”
Earlier this week this newspaper had the opportunity to probe many of the questions posed by Durant with a visitor from Grenada who said that it was difficult to live there and not wonder sometimes about how much the fortunes of the island depend on the arrival of tourist ships from Europe, the USA and elsewhere “and whether or not we might not, one day, scan the horizon and realize that they are not coming anymore.” The concern of our Grenadian visitor had to do with what he said was “our total absence of control” over people’s “spending choices. By at least diversifying our economic pursuits we are able to assert a greater measure of control over how much we earn.”
It is a concern that has fewer implications for Guyana than for most other member countries of Caricom. Here, the commitment to the sector reposes in an emerging market for eco-tourism products though factors that have to do with the creation of a wider physical infrastructure for tourists still mean that however much we may ‘big up’ the tourism product, Guyana is still not a destination of choice for visitors to the region. Certainly, the first policy pronouncement on tourism by President Donald Ramotar since his accession to office last December appears to envisage tourism as very much a ‘lower order’ economic opposition, well behind agriculture, gold mining, the search for oil and the intensification of pursuits related to providing services in the information technology sector.
Not for the first time, the Caribbean is being asked to make critical decisions about the future of tourism as a regional money-earner. The WTO’s upbeat assessment of the prospects for global visitor arrivals has triggered a call for countries to enhance their competiveness to “advance travel facilitation,” an area in which, it says, “there is still room for progress.” The WTO says that countries should “make the most of information and communications technologies in improving visa application and processing formalities as well as the timings of visa issuance. For the Caribbean, however, contemplating the future of tourism goes beyond doing more to facilitate visitor arrivals.
