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Tourism The subject of air travel leads directly to that of tourism. Perhaps I should have started with this because everything that I have seen confirms the central importance assigned to cooperation in tourism by the founders of the ACS. In 16 of our countries tourism is the single largest earner of foreign exchange, in 11 of these it exceeds earnings from all merchandise exports combined. Already nearly 19 million tourists visit the ACS region annually (in Mexico this includes only Cancun and Cozumel,) spending $15 billion; a world market share for the region of around 3 percent[17]. The share was falling in the 1980s, more recently it has been growing but mainly because of the rapid expansion of two destinations--Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In the world as a whole, the growth rate for the industry has been on a downward trend. One of the main challenges for us in tourism is assuring sustainability. Visitors are becoming ever more discriminating about the quality of the tourist product. They want good service and value for money. They want a clean environment. They want to feel safe, and they don’t want to be hassled. The more experienced are bored with fire-eaters and limbo dancers, they want quality entertainment that is culturally authentic, and to experience eco-tourism and heritage tourism. The Caribbean is unique among regions in the diversity of attractions it offers: sun, sea and sand, tropical rainforests and rivers, spectacular mountain chains, semi-active volcanoes, architecture of the Maya, Aztec, and Spanish colonial variety, and of course a wide variety of music, dancing and Carnivals. The path to long-term sustainability in tourism is by way of developing and maintaining internationally accepted standards of excellence in every department: in service, in environmental quality, in the involvement of the community, in respect for cultural integrity and diversity, and in multi-destination tourism that makes use of the variety of cultural and natural attractions. This is the basis for presenting the entire Greater Caribbean region to the world as a Zone of Sustainable Tourism. At the ACS, work is well advanced on the elaboration of quantitative indicators of sustainable tourism and a complementary legally binding instrument among governments on the designation and monitoring of destinations meeting the criteria of the Sustainable Tourism Zone. These are necessary to make operational the concept of Sustainable Tourism—to give the policy instruments teeth. But this road is not easy or conflict-free. It will mean acceptance of the need for regulation backed up with legal measures worked |
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out between governments and the private sector and among governments themselves. It will require broad recognition of the value of strict adherence to common standards, tempering the desire for quick returns with longer-term considerations. There is a major job of public education and consciousness-raising to be undertaken here, in which all of us can play a part. |
Content © Norman Girvan, 2001 - 2002 - Copyright © CaribSeek 2002, All Rights Reserved. Web Published: June 4, 2002
