When two separate shipments of spoiled Indian meat were detected by inspectors at Beirut Port in June, the government was quick to claim that the successful police intervention proved the meat safety “system” in Lebanon worked well.

“Everything is under control. There is no bad meat in the country,” said Ali Hassan Khalil, the agriculture minister, in a statement to the press.

Critics, however, including fed-up members of the meat industry itself, were not as confident. For some, the 250 tons of spoiled meat that rotted away at the Port for several weeks before being shipped back to India was just one indication of a much larger problem. Lebanon, the critics said, still had a long way to go in meeting rigorous, international health and safety standards when it comes to meat.

By mid July, the government seemed to agree. After an intense press conference by the Cattle and Butchers Syndicate, and public scorn from the nascent public watchdog group Consumers Lebanon, both of which pointed to previous shipments of spoiled meat from India, the government issued a ban on all imports of Indian meat – which is to go into effect in mid September since some shipments from India were already en route when the decision was made.

In taking such sweeping action, the government grudgingly fell, at least partly, into line with the EU, which has for years banned meat imports from India because of health and safety concerns. Although the Lebanese government had long argued that the UN deemed Indian meat safe – claiming that the EU’s actions were more about protecting their own domestic meat industry – the twin incidents of spoiled meat seemed to raise enough concern about the costs of continuing to do business with the country, considering that Lebanon imported 75% of all frozen meat consumed last year (6,841 tons out of 9,124 tons in all).

Of course, the decision was not easy – frozen meat from India costs about $1.5 per kilogram, less than chilled meat from Brazil or Paraguay, which costs $3 per kilogram, and substantially less than fresh meat from live European cattle, which costs $5 per kilogram.

Since Lebanese SHAWARMA, as but one example, is primarily made from frozen Indian buffalo meat (cows are sacred in most Indian states), the inescapable political reality is that it’s only a matter of time before the Lebanese consumer feels the pinch. As one industry source explained, “The demand for cheaper and cheaper meat, like from India, has grown steadily, just as the old sources of meat have become more expensive.” Indeed, faced with growing price differentials, the composition of the Lebanese meat diet has changed considerably over the last decade. In fact, some observers now estimate that 15% of all meat consumed in Lebanon is frozen, 25% chilled, and about 50% fresh. Rewind to ten years ago and about 75% of all meat at the dinner table was fresh, derived from live cattle slaughtered locally. Frozen meat represented only a small part of the market.

Live cattle is still Lebanon’s number one commodity import, ahead of cigarettes, at a total value of $135 million last year, but imports of frozen meat from India have risen by 27% and 57% in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Added to this is the fact that nearly 95% of all meat needs are now being met by overseas sources. Gone are the days when Lebanon had a thriving domestic livestock system.

For some critics, the government’s decision to halt the increasing stream of Indian meat imports appeared to offer tacit acknowledgement that, even though inspectors ostensibly discovered the spoiled meat, some risk was present that the meat might have entered the marketplace – health and safety controls, these critics said, were not as strong as the government claimed.

According to one industry source, who, like most wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, the spoiled Indian meat caught at the Port had actually been turned away from Jordan the previous week. When it arrived in Beirut, it was actually a competitor who tipped off ministry of agriculture inspectors that the meat was bad. A top official close to the issue disputed this notion though, saying that international sampling procedures were used on all meat imports, which includes taking a piece from the front, middle and back of each 22 ton container of frozen or chilled meat that arrives in Lebanon and testing it for bacteriological and viral contaminants. The government official was confident that the three inspectors assigned to test meat and monitor livestock at the Syrian borders, the airport and the Port would have caught the spoiled meat. However, according to the industry source, the government does not have enough inspectors to check the multitude of shipments that arrive each day in Lebanon, some of which, the Cattle Syndicate argued publicly, bear false or misleading certificates of origin, validity, and composition, further complicating the process. As the industry source put it tersely, “I don’t let my children eat meat unless I have seen the cow myself.”

Indeed, according to several industry sources as well as top government officials and at least one international expert, the government’s action against Indian meat really should be seen as a kind of surface maneuver, one that deferred, or anticipates (depending on how you look at it), the more difficult kinds of systematic reforms that are needed throughout the meat sector in order to ensure that Lebanese consumers are adequately protected. The reason for this sentiment is threefold: first, Lebanon currently has no food safety law protecting consumers, nor does it have an integrated system for measuring outbreaks of food borne illnesses or problems that occur at meat facilities. One can only wonder if this lack of statistics is why even critics of government food safety practices are also usually quick to assert that the Lebanese don’t really get sick from meat. (Of course, the 60 people recently sickened by a meat borne E-Coli outbreak at two separate wedding banquets in Lebanon would probably disagree.)

Second, the central government has little control over the 40 or so slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities in the country – nearly half of which are essentially unlicensed, despite handling nearly half of the 40,000 tons of meat consumed in Lebanon each year. Since municipalities control and monitor the slaughterhouses that lie within their own jurisdictions, a patchwork of irregular standards and procedures has emerged that inhibits industry wide surveillance and early warning measures. This chaotic situation has even led the Cattle and Butchers Syndicate to call for the closing of the main slaughterhouse serving Beirut, the Quarantine, saying that only a completely new facility could meet modern health and safety standards. As one top official closely involved with the issue put it bluntly, “The slaughterhouses present a serious problem.”

Such a conclusion is not altogether surprising, especially when considering that, as one representative from the ministry of economy and trade – the agency charged with inspecting slaughterhouses, processing plants and meat products – acknowledged, “We do not have enough inspectors.” Add to this the fact that the agency acts primarily as a “complaint driven” institution and what you have is a situation where the Lebanese consumer is left to trust an industry with little in the way of uniform, transparent standards and practices, not to mention vigorous oversight separate from local interests. Third, in banning meat imports from India, the government avoided dealing with the issue of Paraguayan meat, which the EU bans on similar grounds as Indian meat (10% of all chilled meat imports are from Paraguay, with the other 90% from Brazil). This concern may not be a factor for much longer though, as several sources closely involved in the issue predicted that it would only be a matter of weeks before meat from Paraguay was also banned. Despite the problems and late-inning measures, it appears that Lebanon is finally moving ahead with reforms in the meat sector. Both the ministries of agriculture and economy, in addition to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, are pushing forward a food safety law that will help Lebanon gain World Trade Organization membership, as well as better protection for consumers. Significantly, the draft law, which is expected to be taken up by parliament during the next session, aims to centralize authority over the various elements in the meat industry through a Lebanese Food Safety Agency. That body will, hopefully, put in place the law’s new standards and guidelines as well as serve as a proactive monitoring and enforcement regime for all levels of the meat industry. While stressing that the proposal was “excellent” and met the highest international standards, one non-governmental expert involved in the effort acknowledged that centralizing authority over what is now a sprawling web of interests involving butchers, supermarkets, slaughterhouses, ports and processing plants would be a “big challenge.” Either way, it’s a challenge that has clearly been made less daunting in the wake of the spoiled meat flap. According to Zuheir Berro, Consumers Lebanon’s executive director, the momentum couldn’t have come any sooner. In mid July, barely one month after the Indian meat seizures, the ministry of agriculture announced that 25 tons of spoiled fish had been detected and seized at Beirut Port. In one published report, a ministry source said that the importer of the fish was the same one who had tried to bring the spoiled Indian meat into the country in June. “There is an international mafia with connections inside Lebanon” facilitating the entry of spoiled meat, said Berro. “And we have no food safety law. Enough is enough. We need reform now.”

In the wake of criticism from a wide array of religious and political leaders, threats of an outright ban, and the very public defacement of certain controversial images from Tyre to Tripoli, the outdoor advertising industry appears ready to engage in a bit of belated self-regulation. To understand exactly what this will mean, EXECUTIVE sat down with Antonio Vincenti, CEO of the billboard giant Pikasso, who has been at the forefront of efforts to repair the industry’s own image.

Q: Describe Pikasso’s current role in the regional advertising marketplace.

A: We are in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq – Iraq since January. We have forty competitors, more or less, in Lebanon and forty in Jordan and we are the largest company in Lebanon. What we do is rent locations from municipalities or from landlords, we install the boarding and then we rent it by creating networks.

Q: What is at the center of the controversy over outdoor advertising in Lebanon?

A: In a country where you have 17 communities living together, I think we must, if we want to preserve civil peace, respect the beliefs of all of the 17 communities. Now, where does the border stand between what is permitted and what is not permitted? Thank God, general security has a very open minded attitude. Since the beginning of the year (when they became the official censor), we have never had any problem with general security. And I can tell you that they are very liberal in their way of guarding permits. What does this mean? It means we should be very responsible toward this open-minded attitude of the censor. If we say, yes we have had a problem with religious authorities, but we have the permit from general security, then the attitude of general security the next day is to refuse all visuals or half of them, whenever they feel as though they will have the smallest problem – which is a pity. That is why we need to have self-censorship, self regulation – a logical attitude. You know you have visuals you should not accept and you should not accept them nor you should post them.

Q: What will self-regulation entail exactly?

A: After the Association for the Defense of Moral Values in Lebanon asked the justice minister to [crack down] on certain billboards. I advised my colleagues and competitors to take care and be very cautious. We also attempted to create a dialogue among companies. We are all working in the same sector but each one has different values and ethics. So, we suggested, and we will create, groups composed of the president of a municipality, three or four billboard companies, the local association of traders, a representative from the ad agencies and a representative of the ministry for the interior. Our industry objective now is to reduce the number of billboards by 25% in crowded areas. We will start this with the municipality of Antelias. The president there said he would like to be the first one to try this.

Q: Where, from within the industry, have most of the problems with visuals come from?

A: The problem comes from a lot of small agencies – they don’t care, they [produce] vulgar creations and post it everywhere. This is what disturbed and created this problem from all the religious authorities. Now, I would defend to hell pure creativity and the body of a woman on a billboard, if it is done with class, with creativity by a big agency, for a big brand with class. I do not want to be associated with a cheap product, cheap creativity and a vulgar thing.

Q: Some tiles have been taken out of less vulgar billboard visuals though, like one example along the highway to Sidon where Haifa Wehbe’s shoulders were removed.

A: This I am not aware of. A shoulder would never be a problem. Look billboard posters have abused the usage of their billboards, putting images that hurt the feelings of certain people. But if I have a big brand like Aïshti, who wants to put a half naked woman or L’Oreal, I will do it, but I won’t put it in a sensitive area. I would put it in Jounieh for example.

Q: Pikasso has never had a problem with its 3,000 plus billboards?

A: No, thank God. I just had two unipoles for a brand of underwear. I asked them to change the visual and they refused so I stopped the contract. It is not worth it. We want to be responsible. We don’t want to be used by some product or agency in order to sell some products with those provocative visuals.

Q: Has Pikasso ever had to bend the rules in order to compete in the market?

A: We respect the law as much as we can and we only stop respecting the law when our survival is at stake in a city or town. What does this mean? That we would exclude ourselves if we tell a president of a certain municipality, look we don’t install here because it does not respect the law [regarding the spacing of billboards]? Sometimes, I have no choice, or I would exclude the company from the market. If I am in a city where I have installed some billboards and then the council decides to give a competitor space at 50 meters away from me, what should I do? Dismount the billboard and exclude Pikasso from the city?

Q: Since the main advertising law stipulates that billboards should be kept 100 meters apart in all public areas, considering that 60% of the country’s 10,000 billboards are concentrated between Khaldeh and Jounieh, a stretch that only accounts for 10% of the country’s total area, won’t a 25% reduction significantly hurt revenues in these overcrowded, but profitable locations?

A: With the clutter prices are going down. Now, after the industry changes, it will be even better. It will make billboards more attractive and the sector more organized.

Q: Does Pikasso hold any of the billboards where the visual is repeated over and over again ad naseum?

A: No. I think this is not very smart, although there is a saying in Arabic: “Repetition is a good lesson for donkeys.” They believe that, but it is totally wrong.

Q: What’s to say that your 40 or so competitors will do a better job of self-regulating their visuals and, on top of this, agree to voluntarily reduce the number of billboards, especially if some are already apparently willing to push the borders of the industry.

A: Now, I think that general security will be much more rigorous on the permits they will grant and, therefore, you will see that we have less and less of those problematic visuals. I think that our competitors understand that we are all seriously under threat and that we are playing with fire.

Q: According to one published report, Jounieh recently estimated that it should be generating as much as $666,000 per year from taxes on billboards. But, last year, it only saw $26,000 (LL39 million). What accounts for this discrepancy?

A: I will tell you that the figure is wrong in Jounieh. We alone pay the amount of LL40 million annually. I have a colleague who pays LL40 million. I said to myself maybe this is for political reasons, they are attacking the old municipal council. What I have heard though is that a lot of companies have not paid their taxes elsewhere and what I think we should do is haul them in front of the courts and not let them get away with that. We at Pikasso pay rigorously all of our municipal taxes, even during the war, and this is a point of honor for me because it is an obligation.

Q: Although general security has censorship power over billboards, why have you opposed the formation of a specialized body, such as a bureau for the verification of advertising, such as has been recently proposed?

A: In Lebanon, when you create a new authority or council, you will put people together that will argue and fight with each other. We know the people now, and we know that they are good people. We think that one control from general security is more than enough. We have the law, we have to respect the law – we have to be responsible and mature. I think that maneuvering smartly among all those things will be enough.

While, economists tend to measure tourism in visitor numbers, employment and/or contribution to GDP, an equally important gauge is the level of infrastructure development and the intensity of tourism “hotspots” (full of enthusiastic tour guides corralling tours through the nation’s must see sites). Theses abound at the pyramids, the Acropolis, St. Mark’s Square, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, but apart from a few weary public servants pointing to Roman columns at Baalbek, this level of tourist development has yet to be seen in Lebanon.

The BCD may be crowded night after night, but the continued total administrative indifference to emergency access needs and non-implementation of regulatory codes (which the ministry of tourism proclaimed only a few months ago would “absolutely be enforced before the summer”) in itself tells a story about the current art of managing tourism development.

But even the BCD still doesn’t radiate the air of a conventional tourism hotspot. Neither do Lebanon’s shores bear the mark of highly developed tourism displayed around the Mediterranean by sun-and-fun coastal villages, which rival their countries’ world-famous tourism landmarks as crowd magnets.

In this light, Lebanon’s tourism development is entering virgin territory. While the role of Beirut as Jet Set playground and entertainment attraction in the 60s has been touted ad nauseam, one local expert believes Lebanon never was a tourism destination, at least in the sense it would have us believe.

“Lebanon doesn’t belong to the classic scheme of tourism development of the type you find in catalogues, with hotels by the seaside, buffets, one tennis court per each 15 or 18 hotel rooms, and so forth,” said Guy Gay-Para, holder of a doctorate in tourism and owner of a café at Byblos Port. “This kind of tourism has been developed years ago in countries with dozens of kilometers of undeveloped seashores, such as Morocco, Tunisia, the Spain of Franco, the Portugal of Salazar. Recent history has shown that there never was Lebanese tourism in the classic sense. Lebanon was merely a convenient and convivial location that fused business and pleasure.”

However historical reflection is, it can be argued, irrelevant. The world of leisure travels today is very different from what it was 30 years ago and it is not enough to simply reproduce the past. Consumer behavior is diversifying and maturing. Providers and destinations have to increasingly deliver tourism products and services that are not only price competitive and high in quality but also satisfy social and environmental criteria.

This has not escaped the ministry of tourism (which, incidentally still has to demonstrate that it has a firm grasp of what is expected of it). “Our goal is really sustainable tourism,” said the ministry’s director general, Nada Sardouk. “We are working to develop the ‘Hidden Lebanon’, the many beautiful areas of the country that are not yet on the map. What we want for tourism is to achieve is social and economic development.”

What the ministry still has to demonstrate is a full grasp of what is expected of it. In a measure under its authority, it is currently completing the country-wide installation of sign posts and plans to issue comprehensive visitor maps. Although tourism conservation and development issues are spread over numerous institutions other than the ministry, and budget restraints hamper its operation, Sardouk said the shortage of funds did not present an insurmountable problem for the ministry’s role in tourism promotion, thanks (rather surprisingly) to inter-ministerial collaboration and (not surprisingly) barter deals with the private sector.

A good tourism infrastructure relies to a great portion on general infrastructure, road and transportation networks, water and electricity supply, waste collection and waste treatment. According to Sardouk, major highways and access roads to key tourist areas are in a good working order, but she agreed that general infrastructure needs more work. “The council of ministers has taken the decision to review roads and electricity supply to all mountain villages during the summer,” she said, and optimistically, “We still need a two to three year action plan for infrastructure development on water and electricity.”

While most of its aspects are public sector, a significant portion of tourism infrastructure is created by the private sector, from hotels and car rental companies to tour operators and visitor attractions. Here, the Lebanese state has instituted some support mechanism for the creation of this tourism infrastructure under the stipulations of the IDAL investment law 360, which since 2002 has benefited several large projects.

Although many operators say that they nonetheless do not see enough effective government support for development and usually rely on their own devices to plan and execute tourism ventures in absence of clear-cut communal or national strategy framework, the private sector does credit the ministry of tourism with making efforts in favor of their development.

Sardouk on her part described the partnership between private sector and ministry as “very good.” She added that the ministry is quietly “cleaning the house” of the tourism sector from defunct operators and that the quality of tour guide services is being upgraded under a new law, which, (rather bizarrely) mandates new guides to graduate from a specialized four-year university course. As far as being able to accommodate growing visitor numbers over the coming five years, she said she did not expect any bottlenecks in the supply of hotel rooms and facilities, tour buses, or any other aspect of the sector.

An essential operative aspect for securing functional tourism infrastructure, where private and public sector may find difficulties, is in understanding demand and matching it to what the country can supply or is willing to develop. Here Lebanon is facing an interesting challenge, because even at today’s relatively low inflows, the “typical” Lebanon tourist cannot be easily defined.

The guest from the Gulf region, whether he arrives by private jet, in economy class, or by car, is commonly viewed as a long-term guest, seeking a summer base, shopping and entertainment. Around Beirut and in the traditional mountain resort communities, ample evidence shows that many providers made a priority of developing facilities that appeal to this category of tourist.

Visitors from the Levant countries represent a different category, yet, with Syrian and Jordanian guests ranking third and fourth (after Saudi and Lebanese clients) for total hotel nights booked last year, this group represents a market potential that one hears little about. Tourists from outside the region comprise two distinct major groups: Lebanese expatriates and non-Arab (largely cultural and religious travelers with no discernable ancestral ties to the Eastern Mediterranean).

For the time being, data of arrivals and hotel stays (of over 160 nationalities by number of persons, total nights and average length of stay) by the ministry of tourism are quantitative. Because research hasn’t been more specific, the ministry for instance broadly assumes that holders of foreign passports are genuinely foreign as many expatriates enter the country using Lebanese identification. However, in case of second and third generation foreign-born Lebanese, this may not be the case (the number of Brazilian, Mexican and Argentinean hotel clients in 2003, all countries where persons of Lebanese descent make a good share of the population, were comparatively high).

The composition of anticipated future visitor streams, thought to include more and younger individual travelers from out of region, complicates the picture further. Behavior patterns in some of the main origin countries of international tourists digress seriously from public moral standards that apply in the Middle East and many western tourists today expect to be able to openly pursue activities that are not accepted under local behavior codes.

Under maturing trends in interests of European and other international travelers on the other hand, Lebanese tourism can expect to encounter strong and increasing demand for tourism products that they cannot readily supply. Beirut, for instance, lacks a museum that would guide visitors through the country’s cultural and communal diversity or explain the aspects of Lebanese history that people from around the world associate with the country – its exposure to the Middle East conflict. Health, eco- and agro-tourism are vacation growth areas that public and private sector have only recently awakened to and where soft and hard infrastructures need yet to be defined.

With tourism acting as the globalization force in culture, intensification of visitor arrivals would oblige operators and authorities here to embark on a steep learning and action curve in avoiding mistakes made elsewhere during the rise of mass tourism, evolve the tourism infrastructure in a multitude of features, and secure development that can enrich the national existence frame on environmental, cultural, social, and economic terms. In all that, the human element is the combining factor at the core of all tourism infrastructures. “The tourist will know if you lie to him,” said experienced tour guide Francoise Hobeika. “You have to make the tourists see the country through your eyes, let them feel the place and sense the beauty of the land so that they enjoy their visit.”

Besides nine main historic and natural attractions that could all be real tourism hotspots, Lebanon according to Sardouk holds about 190 sites of archeological and cultural interest, many of which are not yet incorporated into the tourism infrastructure. Add to that the country’s human capital and you maximize the power of the destination that might even open up even more untapped niche sectors.

“Among European cultural tourists, many are old and lonely,” said Hobeika. “I have seen seniors who left Lebanon with tears in their eyes and said they would never forget us. They didn’t feel lonely here.” Surely that is incentive enough.
 

This summer, Lebanon is riding on a wave of inbound tourism that is, by local standards, monumental. For the first time in recent memory, the month of June saw more than 100,000 arriving visitors. In relation to June 2003, the upward jump amounted to 37.43 % from 97,273 to 133,678 visitors, translating into a 26.4% share of the total 506,367 arrivals recorded for the first half of 2004. And while this increase was by far the largest year-on-year tourism growth for the month of June in a long time, the even better news is that growth rates in other months of this year were more flabbergasting still. In the first half-year of 2004, three out of six months recorded higher percentage wise increases than June: April (106.81%), March (77.16%), May (46.35%), plus January (35.34%) following not far behind.

For the industry, this means a double positive evolution of increasing and more balanced business as the summertime bulge in inbound tourism is becoming less extreme. “The figures for 2004 show a flattening of the curve between high and low seasons. The rise in tourism figures is consistent and very good for the country,” Nada Sardouk, general director at the ministry of tourism, told EXECUTIVE. In line with the good performance of the first six months, she confirmed that the ministry anticipates a total visitor count topping 1.3 million for this year.

The ministry’s optimism reverberates on the ground. From Bhamdoun to Broumana, the summer resort towns above Beirut saw business shift from zero to vibrant several weeks earlier than last year. The up market hotels that are the usual suspects for doing top business in Beirut confirm that occupancy has approached 100% since the beginning of July. And while Saudi Arabia’s new ambassador to Lebanon estimated in a welcomed message that more than 200,000 of the kingdom’s citizens (and coveted spenders) would vacation in Lebanon this year, arrivals of holidaymakers coming from outside the region also show new promise.

According to industry insiders, regional arrivals improved during the phase of changed travel patterns triggered by September 11 but many European tourists stayed away in 2002 and 2003. From this spring, however, the numbers of cultural tourists from Europe increased healthily and also started to include more people of younger age, where in previous years the “junior” in a tour group would often be 65.

Compared to previous years, while visitor numbers of one million per year marked a 2003 watershed and a 1974 visitor count of 1.48 million has again and again been quoted as the benchmark and the number to beat, the summer of 04 thus looks great. It seems a very fitting moment to pause and take stock of the larger potential, the up- and downsides of tourism for Lebanon, through an assessment of its macro-economic role and relevant public and private sector strategies.

On a worldwide scale, tourism is the fastest growing economic sector in two crucial respects: job creation and foreign exchange earnings, according to the World Tourism Organization (WTO), an agency of the United Nations. But although journeying has been called a human compulsion and universal drive since the first members of the human race embarked on migrations across deserts, oceans and mountain ranges, the career of tourism as a significant component in national economies has been more recent than the ascendancy of activities such as manufacturing, trade, finance, and transportation.

Tourism as a modern activity (in its definition as ‘travel for leisure,’ the term has been used officially for less than 80 years) has changed greatly from its beginnings as an elite pastime of wealthy young Britons who from the 18th century onward roamed Mediterranean destinations to escape their dreadful native climate and cuisine, and who greatly enlarged their cultural knowledge and art collections in the process. This elite phenomenon was the prototype of today’s cultural and leisure tourism and also soon came to include health tourism.

Tourism became less the preserve of the elite in the mid to late 19th century through organized mass travel but it really invigorated the economic equation of tourism in the second half of the 20th century. It brought the expansion of leisure journeys into a service used heavily by average income earners in industrial countries.

From a Lebanese perspective, it must appear sadly ironic that the year 1975 – when visitor numbers here came crashing down – is used as the international reference point for the sector’s rise to a new level and the unfolding of massive growth as worldwide tourist numbers broke the barrier of 200 million persons. From 1975 until 2000, this number of tourists tripled and for the coming 15 years, the WTO (which held its first general assembly as an UNDP agency in 1975) estimates another increase to 1.56 billion international tourist arrivals worldwide in 2020. Published in a report titled, Tourism2020 Vision, just before the turn of the millennium, the WTO prognoses calculated global tourism growth at 4.1% annually between 1995 and 2020 based on input from national tourism authorities and global industry leaders. The WTO’s regional forecast for the Middle East presents an even substantially higher outlook of 7.1% annual growth to reach 68.5 million tourist arrivals in 2020. Under this prediction, the Middle East’s share of international tourist arrivals would double over the study’s 25-year period from 2.2% in 1995 to 4.4% of the world total in 2020. However, a new WTO series of short-term assessments of sector developments, called the World Tourism Barometer, showed in its latest edition published in June that the Middle East achieved 30.4 million international tourist arrivals in 2003 (an increase of 10.3% from 2002), already representing a 4.4% share of the world’s 694 million tourist travels. According the findings of the report, Lebanon’s recent tourism boom is fully congruent with developments in the region and beyond. And assuming a 7.1% annual growth rate for the Middle East from this base figure, the region’s intake in tourism by 2020 could even be significantly higher than forecast in Tourism2020 Vision

The importance of tourism in global economic development in general, and the Middle East in particular, is clearly not in question. What requires examination in the macro-economic context, are the potential and strategies for Lebanese tourism relative to competing destinations and global trends on the one hand and the requirements to optimally manage tourism growth on the other hand.

Under the theme of managing tourism in global development, countries and international institutions are increasingly reviewing the link of tourism to economic, social and environmental development. A study undertaken for the World Bank concluded last year that the organization should cover the “operating environment of tourism” more strongly in its projects and country assistance strategies while carefully assessing the benefits of tourism for sustainable development. In all three respects of economic, social and environmental development, tourism growth has been shown to offer substantive benefits to national economies, but also brings with it risks and potential disadvantages.

In economic development, employment growth, increased foreign exchange earnings and heightened Foreign Direct Investment attractiveness are juxtaposed with increased infrastructure costs, inflationary pressures and the possibility of substantial outflows, or leakage, of tourism-related revenue from the economy. In its social and environmental impacts, badly managed tourism can also harm a nation’s living quality by factors such as limiting parts of the population in their access to water and energy, pushing real incomes lower, over-exploiting nature and degrading historic cultural assets.

For middle and low-income countries in the developing world, the contribution of tourism to GDP often assumes an over-proportional importance. Extreme dependency on tourism is a risk especially for small nations with marginal productivity, examples being exotic vacation islands such as the Maldives, Antigua or the Seychelles.

Whilst the country is still in the process of formulating its sustainability agenda for tourism development, Lebanon’s ministry of tourism today assumes an outlook of rapid growth in tourism of 20% and more per annum for at least the next six years. As director general Sardouk confirmed, the ministry’s best-case expectation is for 4 million tourist arrivals in 2010. This is much higher than the paltry 1.71 million tourists, which the WTO projected Lebanon to attract in that year.

Such a performance would also propel the contribution of tourism to the GDP – estimated to range at present between 8% and 10% – to levels for which the ministry today has no projections. Considering that Lebanon is part not only of the Middle East but also located in the world’s number one tourism region, the Mediterranean – which represents an expected slice of 345 million tourists in the global 2020 leisure travel cake – such an aspiration seems entirely reasonable. This is if it also makes responsible tourism development a crucial item on every private and public sector to-do-list.