Govt will enforce measures to boost tourist industry
Govt will enforce measures to boost tourist industry
JAKARTA (JP): The government will soon enforce coordinated measures to boost the tourist industry into becoming the country's biggest foreign exchange earner by the early 2000s.
"The tourist industry has been growing very fast and President Soeharto has targeted it as the country's main foreign exchange earner by the end of the Seventh Five Year Development Plan (Repelita VII) period," Minister of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications Joop Ave said here on Wednesday evening.
The Repelita VII period will start in 1999 and end in 2004.
Joop said that the initial steps toward enforcing the measures will include the establishment of a special forum on tourism, which is expected to help the government formulate policies and guidelines on the development of the tourist industry.
"How will we manage if, by the end of the Repelita VII period in 2004, we can attract the arrivals of more tourists bringing in US$5.84 billion in foreign exchange, a level currently gained from oil and gas exports?" he asked. "We have to prepare everything carefully to cope with the increasing number of tourist arrivals."
Joop explained that the forum is expected to formulate both strategies and action plans for the next 10 years.
He said he had appointed Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-Jakti, a prominent economist, to organize a small-scale task force to set guidelines for the planned forum, which will involve experts from the faculties of medicine and economics of the University of Indonesia.
"I have had discussion with officials from the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Directorate General of Immigration and the research and development office of my ministry about the establishment of the forum, which is expected to prepare blueprints of action plans," he said.
He said that the forum, which also will involve private sector executives, is expected to provide suggestions on tourist related projects to be supervised by other ministers in the cabinet.
"For instance, the forum should make suggestions to the ministers of public works, transportation, finance, agriculture and justice if the tourist industry needs the development of water supply facilities, airports, customs and immigration offices, as well as quarantine centers," he said.
"We will study as well the methodologies applied by several tourism organizations, including the Pacific Asia Travel Association, the World Tourism Organization and the Economist Intelligence Unit," he said.
"The anatomy of the country's tourism will be reanalyzed precisely because we are going to move faster," he said, adding that the forum will discuss everything related to methodologies and parameters aimed at the success of the tourist industry.
The government, realizing that the prices of oil, the country's major foreign exchange earner, have steadily declined, while competition on the world market for non-oil products is increasing, has been promoting the tourist industry for the past several years.
President Soeharto, in his speech welcoming 1995, said that Indonesia's tourism has been making major inroads and has now become the fourth largest earner of foreign exchange.
The President predicted that the tourist industry will be the top foreign exchange earner during the Repelita VII period.
Data at the Central Bureau of Statistics show that in 1985, the tourist industry, with foreign exchange earnings of $525 million, ranked sixth behind oil and gas, timber, rubber, textiles and coffee.
In 1993, the tourist industry ranked fourth. In that year, Indonesia gained $6.87 billion from oil and gas exports, $6.06 billion from textile exports, $5.47 billion from timber exports and $3.35 billion from foreign tourists. (icn)