Cooperative leaders and stakeholders are set to converge in Vigan City, Ilocos Sur this week for the 1st Cooperative Tourism Cluster Congress.
Vigan is inscribed as a world heritage site in the UNESCO world heritage list.
Congress organizers led by the Cooperative Development Authority in Region 1 through Director Jo Bitonio and co-convenor Divina Quemi, chief executive officer of the Nueva Segovia Consortium of Cooperatives, could not have chosen a more deserving venue.
The capital of Ilocos Sur has just been crowned as one of 7 new “wonder cities” by the New 7 Wonders Foundation, a private institution based in Zurich, Switzerland.
Vigan City, with its iconic Spanish village ambience, makes for a splendid congress venue but cooperators who are committed to bring their enterprise to a new level would certainly look at the Vigan trip not as another junket but an opportunity to be engaged in tourism, considered as the most resilient industry in recent times.
The Coop Congress slated on July 30 to August 1 at the coop-run NSCC Plaza Hotel has for its theme, “Expanding Tourism in the Cooperative Sector.”
The gathering aims to provide perspective opportunities for co-ops that wish to engage in tourism.
The gathering will also “assess challenges and roadblocks” in relation to co-ops with tourism programs with a view to promote tourism as a sustainable economic activity.
The output and resolutions will be codified into a “Call to Action” that hopefully Pres. Benigno S. Aquino III will address during the culminating activity of the 2015 Centennial Year to be held in October.
The Co-op Tourism Congress will be held against the backdrop of unfolding political developments related to next year’s election.
I think the tourism industry will have to slug it out in the short term and watch if the next leadership will commit itself to prioritize co-op development as instrument for grassroots and total human development.
In the international front, the sector is being threatened by geopolitical tensions arising from the Middle East, Ukraine and Southeast Asia.
According to the 2015 World Economic Forum Travel and Tourism (T&T) Report, these global political tensions are being aggravated with growing terrorism threats and the spread of global pandemics.
Should they persist, these global challenges could have significant repercussions on the T&T industry, as they touch on the pre-condition for the sector to grow and develop — the ability of people to travel safely.
To date, the effect of such events on travel & tourism has been mixed. While some countries have witnessed significant decreases in the number of international visitors, other destinations have remained unaffected.
In the Philippines for example, foreign tourist arrivals in the first quarter breached the one-million mark, to 1,391,836 visitors from last year’s 1,309,872, an increase of 6.26 percent. The Department of Tourism earlier targeted 6 million tourists this year but negative advisories by a number of countries prompted the agency to downgrade its CY targets to a “more practical” 5 million.
The growth in PH tourism maybe sluggish but it is persistent.
Meanwhile, the global T&T sector has actually continued to grow over these past years.
According to the UN World Tourism Organization, international tourist arrivals reached a record 1.14 billion in 2014, 51 million more than in 2013.
Industry estimates point to the strength of the sector, now accounting for 9.5 percent of global GDP, a total of US$ 7 trillion, and 5.4 percent of world exports.
World organizations call on governments and all sectors to prioritize and fast-track the development of the T&T sector as it “continues to play a key role as a driver of growth and job creation, growing at four percent in 2014 and providing 266 million jobs, directly and indirectly.”
The Travel and Tourism industry now accounts for one in 11 jobs on the planet, a number that could even rise to one in 10 jobs by 2022, according to the World and Tourism and Travel Council.
By the way, the Philippines placed number 74 in the WEF rankings for T&T competitiveness.
The 141 economies assessed in the WEF T&T competitiveness survey had Spain on the top of the list, outpacing France for the first time. At the bottom is Chad.
I expect that the current domestic and global context and the complexities of it all will be tackled in the Co-op Tourism Congress.
Why should co-ops go into tourism? My pedestrian opinion is this: because modern tourism is closely linked to community development, and cooperatives, through their social services, have a solid track record of 100 years. Cooperatives had the smarts to develop from scratch judging by its storied past, even way back in 1915.
An enabling environment is crucial, and with information and communications technology at its fingertips, tourism is the next growth area of the cooperative sector.
I am privileged to be invited to the Co-op Tourism Congress to share, “The Storytelling Power of Cooperatives”.
This is a paper I first presented in Kuala Lumpur in December 2014 during the International Conference on Women in Cooperative Development sponsored by Malaysia’s apex body for cooperatives, ANGKASA.
Last June, I also had the opportunity to share my advocacy of telling the co-op story before the Agriculture Co-ops Cluster Congress held in Cauayan City, Isabela.
The advocacy has since evolved into a training program for cooperatives which was piloted in May this year through the VICTO National Federation.
The pilot training had young cooperators and Cooperative Development Authority CDA-designated information and communications officers taking courses on cooperative storytelling, clear and effective writing, basic video/film documentation and camera techniques.