Pinning hopes on tourism

Pinning hopes on tourism

Consider Indonesia's vast territorial expanse, its rich and diverse cultural heritage, its thousands of miles of sandy palm- fringed beaches, its verdant land, and the expectation that tourism will become this country's biggest foreign exchange earner by around the turn of the century will seem entirely justified.

Like many other industries, Indonesia's tourist industry has experienced ups and downs over the past few decades. But, after a slow start in the late 1970s, the steady growth which it has shown in the past several years seems to indicate that the hope expressed by Minister of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications Joop Ave in Jakarta yesterday, could indeed become a reality -- if certain conditions are met.

A brief look at some basic data released by the Central Bureau of Statistics may serve to underscore such optimism. In 1985 the country earned US$525 million from tourism, which made the industry rank fifth that year as a foreign exchange earner in the non-oil sector, following timber, rubber, textiles and coffee. By the end of 1993, earnings from tourism had increased more than sixfold to reach the $3.35 billion level, making it rank third in terms of non-oil foreign exchange earnings.

According to the President and Acting Executive Chairman of the Asia Pacific Travel Association, Lakshman Ratnapala, Indonesia could become one of the 10 highest-growth destination countries in the region within the coming decade. Meanwhile, in the past couple of decades, according to Ratnapala, the growth of tourism in the Asia Pacific region has been consistently higher than in the rest of the world.

All of this is naturally reason for satisfaction. The plus sides of tourism as an industry have been stated often enough. For one thing it is capable of directly spreading the fruits of development to the people who need them most -- the village craftsmen and small cottage industries producing souvenirs, for example. Furthermore, since tourist destinations are spread out across the country it is also capable of distributing development over a wide area and into isolated regions. And, as an industry, it is practically non-polluting.

However, having briefly summarized the potentials, it is only proper that we also look at some of the challenges that must be faced if our expectations from this particular industry are to be met. Obviously, the success of our tourist development efforts will depend a good deal on how well we can coordinate the efforts of the various government and private agencies that are concerned. This includes not only such obvious sectors as those of transportation, immigration, health, the hotel industry and tour operators and the like, in which much has already been done in this respect in the past years.

Perhaps, one of the greatest challenges that still confronts us at present may be to prepare and educate the average Indonesian to be a good host. It is not easy to admit, especially since we like to pride ourselves on being a hospitable people, that all too often visitors are not accorded the consideration and respect, nor are they given the assistance they deserve as our guests. Complaints of rough or abusive treatment are still too often heard.

For that reason we welcome the government's plan to set up a special forum on tourism to anticipate the growth of this promising sector in the coming decade. We are confident that such a forum will be able to gradually resolve the problems that may still be in the way of achieving our goal of making tourism the prime earner of foreign exchange at a time when the prospect of declining oil revenues is beginning to loom.