Tourism caught napping by northern travel restrictions
View(s):When top US trade official, Michael Delaney, the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Central and South Asia, visited Colombo this week for official talks with local counterparts, he was impressed by the level of development and the opportunities for US companies in infrastructure development.
He was in particular enthusiastic about the surge in tourism which has grown to over a million arrivals last year from less than 500,000 in the year before the war ended in 2009.
During a media briefing in Colombo on Thursday, he spoke of tourism as a huge growth centre and that Sri Lanka can reach a level where it was attracting more tourists than Thailand before the war happened.
In the same vein, however – when asked by a reporter -, he said inconsistent policies could also deter growth.
These inconsistencies surfaced once again on the back of the announcement earlier this week that military authorities have suddenly (at least as far as sections in the tourism industry are concerned) restricted travel to the north unless advance permission is sought.
The tourism industry was caught napping by the announcement. Tourism is the fastest growing sector in Sri Lanka and there is no other sector that is growing as fast but it doesn’t seem to be getting “VIP” treatment – as it should – from the authorities.
While some industry organisations had checked the announcement and found it to be true; other organisationswere under the presumption that it was a temporary decision based on the President’s visit to Jaffna last week. That too was a sudden move, as reported in last week’s Sunday Times, where some foreigners were turned away at the Omanthai checkpoint in northern Sri Lanka.
Whether the latest decision by the Defence Ministry is rationale or not, there should have been some intimation to the country’s fastest growing sector. While it may not be entirely the fault of the military administration, someone needs to take responsibility for this action which has caused some inconvenience.
What kind of administration makes ad hoc decisions that could jeopardise the growth potential of a crucial sector? And what an embarrassment to local agents when their visitors were turned away at the barrier.
The military says that the regulation barring foreigners from visiting the north was never removed after the war. In the words of its spokesman, Brigadier Ruwan Wanigasooriya, “this is not a new development. The restriction has been there. It was not relaxed; ‘less implemented’. It was never taken off”.
Either the industry has been caught with their pants down for not knowing that the rule existed and that it could be enforced at any time or there has been a lack of communication between the defence establishment and tourism officials, who also appeared to be unaware that the rule still existed.
The rationale for the enforcement of the ban on foreigners travelling to the north unless with permission, is based on security concerns and a possible re-alignment of former LTTE forces abroad to re-activate the movement. It also came a week before the European Union lifted the ban on the LTTE (but freezing its assets), a move which raised concerns from Sri Lanka’s Ministry of External Affairs.
While security concerns have to be taken seriously and the military establishment understandably cannot let down their guard, the crucial question here is the manner in which these decisions are taken, and that too in the context of tourism with goals of reaching a phenomenal 2.5 million arrivals in the next two years.
According to tourism authorities, some 8 per cent of arrivals to Sri Lanka visit the north. A large portion may be Sri Lankan expatriates holding foreign passports, who are also categorised as ‘tourists’; yet other foreign visitors too should be adequately briefed of the on-off system of restrictions on travel to the north. And for a country that has been touted as at peace for the past five years (one of the reasons why the Chinese are coming in large numbers), sudden decisions like this are not good for business and long term planning.
One of the fundamental problems in Sri Lanka has been the inconsistency in policy. There are many examples to illustrate this — Frequent tax revisions in the import of motor vehicles; unsolicited bids for land development, take-over of private sector companies and lately, proposed new land laws that restrict foreigners from owning land.
Persistent changes in policy are not good for foreign investors. As pointed out by Delaney, investors go to countries with a long-term investment strategy of at least 20 years and need consistency in policy formulation.
The tourism industry also works on these barometers. For example, many tourist hotels have come up in Jaffna in the post-war era on the ‘presumption’ that there are no restrictions on travel. The same applies with the East (another hot spot during the war), where the development has been much, more.
While foreign NGOs will continue to travel to the North after seeking permission from the authorities, other foreigners are unlikely to take the trouble of seeking permission (even if it is handled by their local travel agent) to travel to that part of the country for sight-seeing.
These issues would have been easily sorted out if there was better coordination between the defence and tourism authorities, so that travel agents and hoteliers were aware that the north is not ‘freely’ open for business and tourism, and restrictions on travel can be imposed at any time, on any day based on security considerations.