WHAT NEXT FOR TOURISM IN BURMA?

Make Travel Fair commented on a Guardian Unlimited Travelog article 'What Next for Tourism in Burma' by Tony Wheeler, Lonely Planet posted today.

Comment:

Tourism is an economic lifeline for many people around the world but equally a source of hope, inspiration and knowledge that fuels dreams and ambition. The Burmese people need tourists to visit but they also need tourists to stay away. They need a particular type of tourist - the small scale, low-budget independent traveller who will put money directly into burmese hands and who won't entertain 'manufactured tourism' created at the expense of burmese people. To know whether this is possible requires a visit.

It's a damaging decision for anyone who hasn't been to Burma to attempt to offer advice or an opinion on whether or not tourism is good for the country, but I believe it is if it can be done right.

John Pilger made the documentary Burma: Land of Fear at the end of the 90s. His website contains this information:

"The SLORC has also been careful who it encourages to visit Burma. From the start, the regime encouraged up-market package tourists, not independent back-packers, and watched for any foreign pro-democracy activists....The rapid expansion of Burmese tourism since 1996's 'Visit Myanmar Year' has had terrible implications for the people of Burma. That the success of their policies has relied on the willingness of foreigners to indulge in the luxuries the SLORC has laid on makes the abuse that the Burman people have endured even more abhorrent."

Comment 2:

Is it fair and indeed sensible to refer to the entire tourism industry as a monoculture when in fact it represents an entire spectrum of forms? Low-budget backpackers and high-end luxury resort hotels are at opposite ends of a huge divide that correspond to equally different forms of tourism, with equally different impacts on a destination.

When an independent travel orientated company speaks out with an opinion they talk from a very different point of view about a very different industry to that of an international tour company or resort hotel chain.

Is this a new debate about the difference between travellers and tourists? maybe that's not a vanity issue after all. Maybe Burma doesn't need tourists, maybe it needs travellers.

Comment 3:

The question about whether people should be travelling to Burma obviously raises some strong and contrasting views. I would ask the following question to some of the opposition:

Is it better to sit idylly by in the western world speaking about a political situation we have only been introduced to through media coverage than it is to visit the country as an independent traveller and see for ourselves? It may be true that travel to Burma is not the best thing that we can do but neither is it the worst, just like sitting at home exchanging views on a news website. It seems that with tourism numbers just a 'drop in the bucket' compared to neighbouring Thailand we are obviously not providing the ruling military with a great deal of worldwide support in this sense. The future of Burma lies in the hands of the Burmese and the political and economic policies of the rest of the world.

I very much doubt that staying home and watching the news in defiance of a military regime in an effort to 'help the people' is the primary reason many of us haven't been to Burma...we've never had the opportunity. If all countries were visited on the back of such strongly debated issues as this perhaps more people who do travel would do so with their eyes open much wider to the positive and negative impacts of tourism, environmentally and economically as well as socially.

Burma may be in the spotlight here but it's certainly not the only place in the world where abhorrent policies are 'approved' by tourists.