Sustainable Tourism and Zimbabwe

Maybe I shouldn’t listen to the news in the morning. It’s depressing. Zimbabwe non-elections, oil prices up, cost of living up, strikes for more pay. At least it’s warm for Wimbledon.

But all the first things are important and they will affect our lives if we don’t do something, so my depression has got to be changed into action pretty bloody smartly.

More Expensive Travel

The oil price is still shooting up on its way past a crucifying $150 a barrel due to demand and informed speculation. The growth of biofuels to cap the oil price and provide a more sustainable fuel is hampered because hungry people want to grow food instead.

More Expensive Food

The demand for agricultural land, informed speculation and increasing appetites have increased food prices and its scarcity. In many countries there are bans on the export of rice, which has doubled in price in a year. We have only 40 days left of now very expensive wheat stocks.

Bigger Appetites

The developing world is developing its populations, its wealth and its appetites for food and travel and accommodation. By 2030, world population is expected to increase by 50%, to 9bn people. By when, those in developing countries who earn more than $10,000 pa will increase from 300m to 2.1bn. If the Millennium Development Goals are hit, world poverty will be eradicated.

Have They Missed The Boat?

Unfortunately, as more and more people want more and more food and travel and accommodation, it’s more and more expensive, and less and less easy to provide. Industrially-generated climate change challenges harvests through droughts and floods. Our water use is profligate to say the least. There are limited supplies of fossil fuels and more farm animals will mean more methane, more global warming, more environmental degradation, worse harvests.

Mother Earth simply looks like it’s reaching its limit to nurture.

How Does Sustainable Tourism Fit In?

Well-organised sustainable tourism can develop markets for local produce and develop local incomes through tourism. This can make food production and transportation more efficient, cost-effective and accessible.

Sensitive sustainable tourism protects and nurtures our tourism product - our environmental, cultural, economic and social heritage

And Zimbabwe?

Above all, tourism is practical hands-on information transfer. It may seem hedonistic, and a luxury, but it seamlessly tells us what we need to know about our destinations and what other nationalities think.

Without the intermediaries – newspapers, TV, radio, the pub, the restaurant, and the bloody internet. All of it is someone else telling us what to think and how to think. Whereas tourism is us informing ourselves.

Left at home, we’d still be eating pasta out of a tin, we’d still be eschewing “Mucky Foreign Food”, we’d still think that foreigners were wops and eyties and smelt of garlic. I’d hazard a guess that without foreign travel we wouldn’t be in the European Union or any of the other regional and global co-operations.

Travel gives us the opportunity to find out for ourselves, to crash the myths that others are pushing at us. Once we’ve done it, and seen for ourselves, we’re never the same again.

And why sustainable tourism? Because in truly sustainable tourism, you’re much, much closer to your hosts in every way – economically, culturally, and practically.

Who’s been to the Victoria Falls? What do you remember about Zimbabwe? Does this inform your view, or does it not?