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Tsunami
impact on hotels Dr. Michael E Conroy, Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar Yale Programme on Forest Certification, Yale University, New York, who supports the shift to sustainable tourism from a mass market product, believes globally tourism is rapidly moving away from the mass market to eco-tourism. “Most importantly eco-tourism would not be limited to the beach fronts but is equally possible in the dry zone, near cultural attractions and even on the edges of the major cities,” he said in an interview last week at the Ranweli Holiday Village at Waikkal. Dr. Conroy, member of the Board of the International Eco-tourism Society (TIES) based in Washington, is in Sri Lanka for a research study on the eco-tourism potential in Sri Lanka. He said the current trip is part of a fund raising campaign where TIES organized a Benefit Auction in which 40 to 50 (overseas) trips were purchased by members and the proceeds gifted to the organisation. Dr Convoy is based at Ranweli and travels around particularly to the Cultural Triangle. He is accompanied by his wife Dr Lucille C Atkin, Vice President, International Programme Director, Margaret Sanger Centre International, New York. As the exercise is a fund raising campaign for TIES the couple has paid US $ 1,800 for the trip. He also works on forestry and analyses the impact on the society for another International Organization called Forest Stewardship Council an international NGO passed in Germany for the last 10 years. On Sri Lankan tourism, Dr Conroy said that the government has mostly invested in support of Mass Market Tourism (MMT), which consists of huge concrete structures using a massive amount of glass and steel to bring tourists from around the world for a narrow experience. Many countries and World Bank have shown that this kind of tourism has a very low positive impact on development. MMT often benefited the foreign investors as construction of these buildings involved material to be imported. He said that it is sad to note that some hotels even import their requirements of food or part thereof. He said that even the service provided in MMT has a very high import component and from an economic perspective that kind of tourism has very little developmental impact. It has also been found that these MMT hotels are built on highly environmental sensitive locations and effect high damage to the environment even while they are being constructed. Eco-tourism is normally built adhering to the norms and principles which utilize local and sustainable material and in turn protect the local environment during the construction phase and after. He said, "You build your tourist resort with the appreciation and preserving the environmental values of the people around the area and also serving the aspirations of the tourists.” Eco-tourism facilities are often less expensive to build in terms of foreign exchange and also tend to provide greater developmental impact upon the local community. "I am convinced that the traveling population in the industrialized countries would be happy to taste eco-tourism and already India and China looking for it positively," Dr Conroy said adding that he found that eco-tourism here could be applied extensively as Sri Lanka is a small island with its natural and cultural wealth distributed in a small, geographical area. That also makes it relatively easy for a visitor to obtain a very complex holiday experience in a short period of time. He
said that Ranweli has meticulously worked on preserving its natural
environment by even protecting a section of its land that’s
untouched virgin scrub jungle with the original mangrove plantation
and where there are many kinds of birds. |
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