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.