Bali at a crossroads: Tourism or agriculture

Bali at a crossroads: Tourism or agriculture

I Wayan Juniartha, The Jakarta Post, Denpasar

Bali, one of the richest provinces in Indonesia, celebrated its
44th anniversary on Aug. 14. Despite an abundance of economic,
natural and cultural assets, the province is facing a number of
pressing problems. The Jakarta Post puts these issues under the
spotlight in the following articles.

Establishing a synergical relationship between the influential
tourism industry sector and the waning agriculture sector is
arguably the most important challenges the current, and the
future, leadership of Bali must face.

For years, the two sectors have seemingly been in a
contradictory position toward each other, where by the mere
existence of one sector could mean extinction of the other one.

This antithetical position is the inevitable result of the
model and course the Bali tourism industry has opted to follow.
The temptation of quick cash, a lot of cash in this case, has
lured both the Balinese's elite and people to follow the path of
mass tourism, characterized by, among other things, its heavy
consumption of land and natural resources.

With the mass tourism paradigm firmly implanted in their mind,
the majority of Balinese people believed that in order to succeed
in generating the largest revenue possible, the island's tourism
industry must be able to attract as many visitors, foreign and
otherwise, as possible. Building as many tourism facilities as
possible in order to be able to cater for every need of the
visitors is the next logical step on their mind.

Undoubtedly, this tourism facility development is the prime
force behind the wave of land conversion that has been engulfing
Bali since the advent of mass tourism in the island. A large
proportion of the land that is being converted into tourism
facilities, and tourism-related industries, or urban housing
facilities, used to be fertile rice fields, or plantations.

By 2000, there were around 1,368 hotels (36,556 rooms) and 726
restaurants (53,217 seats) in Bali. One could only wonder how
many hectares of rice fields had perished to make way for those
buildings.

Currently, the rate of rice field conversion has reached 600-
1,000 hectares per year. Needless to say, this tourism industry-
triggered land conversion has inflicted grave and massive damage
on the island's agriculture sector.

Furthermore, the quick cash, better standard of living and the
image of modernness provided by the tourism industry has prompted
the majority of Balinese youths to pursue their dreams in this
field, instead of toiling laboriously in the muddy and not so
rewarding rice fields.

Data from 2,000 shows that out of the total of 1,712,954
workers in Bali, only 555,248 people worked in the agriculture
sector. In Denpasar, Badung and Gianyar -- the three regencies
with the largest tourism industry investment, the percentage of
people who worked in agriculture sector was miniscule, ranging
from 4.44 percent up to 17.45 percent. And, there were only
171,553 hectares of rice fields and plantations left in those
regencies.

These phenomena pose Bali with several difficult problems. The
tourism industry, that grows stronger by the year, and gave birth
to a multicultural-heterogonous values and industrial society,
and the ever-decreasing agriculture sector are both the main
trigger and the principal setting of the disintegration of Bali's
traditional values and institutions, which for ages had been
relying heavily upon the homogenous-rice growing culture and
society as their basic foundation.

There are immediate needs for social re-engineering and
cultural re-inventing to prevent this new heterogonous and
multicultural society from colliding violently with the still
homogenous traditional society.

From an economic point of view, there are also problems of
Bali's increasing dependence on outside agricultural products,
and of Balinese farmers' marginalization.

Yet, nobody could deny, the tourism industry has played a
significant role in Bali's progress. This industry -- by flooding
the island with investment and job opportunities -- has helped
the majority of Balinese people to get better education, a better
standard of living, and, most importantly, to conduct "vertical
mobility", which resulted in the formation of the new middle-
class Balinese.

Tourism has also provided the island with a securer economic
blanket than any other area in this country, making Bali arguably
the most prosperous island in Indonesia, with only a 2.27 percent
unemployment rate, and 8.53 percent poverty rate. The industry
attracts 1.5 million foreign visitors per year, and generates
67.32 percent of the island's GDP.

Hencefore, it is not the question of choosing the tourism
industry over agriculture, or vice versa, since both sectors are
fundamentally important for Bali. It is a question of identifying
and establishing a mutually-benefial relationship between these
two sectors.

"Idealistically, the tourism industry and the agriculture
sector form some sort of self-contained alliance, in which the
agriculture sector's products are fully absorbed by the tourism
industry, and in turn the tourism industry's needs are fully-
provided by the agriculture sector. But, that is a perfect
scheme, and, unfortunately, we are living in an imperfect world,"
noted sociologist and head of the Bali Tourism Authority Gde
Pitana said.

The less perfect method, according to Pitana, is to devise
local legislation to protect local farmers and agricultural
sector. The legislation would dictate the tourism industry to
prioritize local agricultural products. Moreover, the legislation
would also provide various tax benefits for the tourism industry
companies that initiate, fund, and get involved in a mutually
beneficial cooperation with the local farmers.

On the other hand, the government must also launch a
comprehensive program to educate and help local farmers increase
the quality of their products, and to assist the agricultural
sector in strategic planning and re-positioning so it could
finely tune-in it's products with the actual needs of the tourism
industry.

"On the farmers' level it means they must be able to produce a
better quality, more healthy product with less, and if possible,
no non-organic fertilizer and chemical pesticides. The sector, as
a whole, must have the ability to be flexible and adaptive to the
fluctuated tourism industry's demands and needs," Pitana said.

Most importantly, all the forementioned measures would be
fruitless if the government did not put a leash on the land
conversion rate.

"The government must decide when enough is enough and then act
firmly on it. There should be a clear and definite limit on the
land conversion activity," he said.

These three measures are probably the most feasible methods of
transforming the old feud between the tourism industry sector and
the agriculture sector into a mutually-beneficial cooperation and
synergy.

With those two sectors being synergized, Bali will have a
better chance to move smoothly out of its sociological and
cultural problems -- the growing pains a society goes through in
a transformatory period from the agricultural era to the
industrial era it currently faces.