Comparison of Sustainable Tourism Development in Cuba and Curacao

Assyifa Yolanda – 06/193281/SP/21371
Ilmu Hubungan International

The Important of Sustainable Tourism Development
Today, tourism is one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the world. Tourism can be considered one of the most remarkable socio-economic phenomena of the twentieth century. From an activity “enjoyed by only a small group of relatively well-off people” during the first half of the last century, it gradually became a mass phenomenon during the post-World War II period, particularly from the 1970s onwards. It now reaches an increasingly larger number of people throughout the world and can be considered a vital dimension of global integration. Although domestic tourism currently accounts for approximately 80% of all tourist activity, many countries tent to give priority to international tourism because now it become the world’s largest source of foreign exchange receipts.
Tourism comprises an extensive range of economic activities and can be considered the largest industry in the world. During the 1990s, when the globalization of tourism reached unprecedented proportions, international tourism receipts had a much higher average annual growth rate (7.3%) than that of gross world product. By 1999, international tourism receipts accounted for more than 8% of the worldwide export value of goods and services, overtaking the export value of other leading world industries such as automotive products, chemicals, and computer and office equipment.
While tourism provides considerable economic benefits for many countries, regions, and communities, its rapid expansion can also be responsible for adverse environmental, as well as socio-cultural, impact. Natural resource depletion and environmental degradation associated with tourism activities pose severe problems to many tourism-rich regions. The fact that most tourists chose to maintain their relatively high patterns of consumption (and waste generation) when they reach their destinations can be a particularly serious problem for developing countries and regions without the appropriate means for protecting their natural resources and local ecosystems from the pressures of mass tourism.
In addition to pressure on the availability and prices of resources consumed by local residents—such as energy, food and basic raw materials—the main natural resources at risk from tourism development are land, freshwater and marine resources. Without careful land-use planning, for instance, rapid tourism development can intensify competition for land resources with other uses and lead to rising land prices and increased pressure to build on agricultural land. Moreover, intensive tourism development can threaten natural landscapes, notably through deforestation, loss of wetlands and soil erosion. Tourism development in coastal areas—including hotel, airport and road construction—is often a matter for increasing concern worldwide as it can lead to sand mining, beach erosion and other forms of land degradation.
Besides the consumption of large amounts of natural resources, the tourism industry also generates considerable waste and pollution. Disposal of liquid and solid waste generated by the tourism industry has become a particular problem for many developing countries and regions that lack the capacity to treat these waste materials. Disposal of such untreated waste has, in turn, contributed to reducing the availability of natural resources, such as freshwater. In addition, relatively high levels of energy consumption in hotels—including energy for AC, heating and cooking—as well as fuel used by tourism-related transportation can also contribute significantly to local air pollution in many host countries and regions. Local air and noise pollution, as well as urban congestion linked to intensive tourism development, can sometimes even discourage tourists from visiting some destinations.
Countries and regions where the economy is driven by the tourism industry have become increasingly concerned with the environmental, as well as the socio-cultural problems associated with unsustainable tourism. As a result, there is now increasing agreement on the need to promote sustainable tourism development to minimize its environmental impact and to maximize socio-economic overall benefits at tourist destinations. The concept of sustainable tourism, as developed by the World Tourism Organization in the context of the United Nations sustainable development process, refers to tourist activities “leading to management of all resources in such a way that economic, social and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity and life support systems”.

Sustainable Tourism Development in Cuba
Cuban tourism has been developing steadily since the 1950s. The centralized planned development of Cuba’s tourism has been concentrated in the Havana-Varadero (70%) core with other poles, notably Guadalavaca and some of the keys such as Cayo Coco and Cayo Largo also receiving attention. In the 1950s the US Congress was putting added pressure on the Crime Syndicates in Las Vegas and they were on the lookout for a new playground if the US Congress shut down Las Vegas. This fuelled the growth of tourism in the 1950s up until the time of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Cuban tourism grew from 340.000 in 1990 to over 2.3 million in 2006. A major problem, however ensued from this growth in that the focus of the growth was in the area of development of hotels and tourism products in an attempt to accumulate hard currency without consideration of sustainable development and any significant discussion or focus on the environment.
In 2003, the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), working on the initial works in sustainability by the World Tourism Organization meetings in 1995 in the Canary Islands and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, in a meeting determined that Cuba has 4 major areas which could be looked at to evaluate sustainable tourism. The 4 areas determined by the ACS were Varadero, Cienega de Zapata, Vinales and Las Terazzas. To this end the current project was developed and proposed and has been supported by the World Wildlife Fund as the principle agent working in conjuction with Transat A.T., the largest tour operator in Canada and 5th largest in the world. The main focus of the project is as follows :
• Determination of problems in each of the four selected zones.
• Coordination an integration of actors involved in each selected zone and with Canadian tour operators.
• Determination of effective indicators which can be used to determined the effectiveness of the current strategy in sustainable tourism development and growth.
• Development of new tourism product which coordinate between sustainable development and ecotourism to promote conservation and allow tourists to be able to experience the unique environment that Cuba offers.
• Development of a methodology to expand the current process to other tourism zones within Cuba and the Caribbean.
In the evaluation of this project, concerns lie in adequate participation of key stakeholders and the ability to successfully implement the changes necessary to tradeoff environmental concerns against the profits that can be attained by tourism growth. Cuba’s government has learned from the destruction of the environment caused by the last rapid growth. The present project organizers have been adamant in engaging all stakeholders in the process. The process is being led by well respected international organization WWF and local key stakeholders of the Ministry of Tourism as well as the Fundacion Antonio Nunez Jiminez del Hombre y Naturaleza.

Sustainable Tourism Development in Curacao
Curacao is an island of the federation of Netherlands Antilles situated in the Caribbean Sea. It covers only 444 km², with a population of approximately 130.000 inhabitants. Although part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Curacao does not have a developed economy. But with a GDP per capita of around 12.400 US$ and low inflation rate, it enjoys a better economic situation than many developing countries in the Caribbean and Latin America.
The tourism sector has developed on Curacao since the 1960s. After an initial growth through both cruise and stay-over tourism, development stagnated during the 1980s. To reinvigorate it, the government adopted a revised package of highly attractive fiscal incentives for foreign investors at the end of 1980s. An increase in tourism volumes followed. Since early 1990s, stay-over visitors counted between 200.000-220.000 tourists annually. Currently, tourism is the third income generation activity, after oil processing industry and shipping.
With the recovery of tourism, the expansion of tourism facilities and their socio-environmental impacts worried the environmental and local stakeholders who started to put pressure on politicians for a policy that combines tourism development with nature protection, and local development and welfare. At the end of 1997, a policy document was adopted, called “Policy for Sustainable Tourism in the Netherlands Antilles (ST Policy)”. The goal was to make tourism ecologically sustainable, with only very few marginal provisions on the social dimension of sustainable tourism.
Policy design is important, but understanding why implementation happens, or not, and what factors influence actor’s behavior and policy results its crucial for achieving ultimately a pattern of development in the tourism sector that responds to sustainability demands. The main drivers for the implementation of the measure were : the demand from the upper levels of the tourism value chain, through the need of Dutch outgoing tourism companies to contract with environmentally-certified companies at destinations; the positive motivation of NGOs taking initiatives and mobilizing the appropriate actors; and the interest the federal environmental agency MINA in sustainable tourism in Curacao.
There were several factors that positively affected the motivation of accommodation companies to join the project. The synergy created with their application process for a recognized foreign ecolabel was an important reason. All certified companies were already in process for the Green Globe or Dutch Milieu Barometer ecolabels. They were interested in being marketed by outgoing Dutch tour operators and travel agencies, who also wanted to make visible their implementation of PMZ measures. Especially the prospect of being taken up in the brochures of the largest Dutch tour operators TUI under the ‘green thumb’ sign was very attractive, which happened for few years. Underlying these considerations was the awareness that there are economic benefits for certain measures, such as water and energy saving. But there was also a (necessary) belief in a growing market of environment-caring tourists especially in Europe and Netherlands. All accommodations with NA certification had at the time of the NA project: numerous tourists coming from Netherlands, and a management with intrinsic environmental motivations. These latter factors positively motivated companies to engage in the application process for international ecolabels even before the NA project emerged.