"Agri-Tourism"
Editorial
Stabroek News
April 26, 2002
The newly emerging sector of tourism, with all its envisaged spin-off for sociological and economic improvements, has not consciously recognised aspects of our country's hidden landscapes and loveliness as meaningful components of our total tourism thrust.
It is not the intention to depreciate the value of our rain forests and waterfalls as prime tourist attractions. However, we insist that many of our potentially major tourism drawing cards already exist and are quite unique. Right now they remain cryptic and unadvertised, when in fact they should be publicised and exploited. Agriculture falls under this rubric.
We have all heard of or experienced first hand, the great expanses of wheat fields in the grain belts of the United States and Canada. Tourist buses travel almost in convoy to witness the awesome spectacle of wheat growing and being harvested. Well, we have a similar sight right here in Guyana. At Black Bush Polder, on the banks of the Abary, in Essequibo and West Demerara, tens of thousands of acres of golden rice swaying in the cool breeze, gilding the landscape to the horizon, just prior to harvest time, is a picture that not even Van Gogh could capture. In the riverain areas, this picture has the added attraction of nesting Canje Pheasants drying their wings in the early morning sun, of cattle and their cowboys on horses swimming from bank to bank. In the Abary the scene is interrupted by the wonderfully constructed seven-door sluice, behind which Lukunani fight each other for the bait on your line. At dawn, when the mist is still on the silent creeks, visitors can experience the riverside farmsteads awakening, with the indefatigable farmer commencing his hour long dental hygiene with a black sage twig stuck nonchalantly in the side of his mouth. This is unique. These are the scenes eco-tourists remember most; these are the slides that are shown to friends when the holiday experience is being related.
In Guyana, we do not harvest sugar cane with machines. We burn the leaves and employ manual labour to cut the cane. We use canals and punts to transport the stalks from field to factory. We juxtapose the old techniques of buffalo drawn punts and the modern cane hoists. These are singular occurrences in the sugar industry in this part of the world, that never fail to impress visitors to the estates.
The Dadanawa ranch in the South Rupununi is reported to be the world's largest single unit cattle enterprise comprising 1.2 million acres, 24 times the size of Barbados. The terrain, sometimes flat and sometimes rolling, always with the ubiquitous Kayembe trees, is where wildlife and cattle herds co-exist in an ecotourist dream.
The participation at round-up time, when the weaners are sorted and branded and the cattle counted and treated in the special chutes, is an indelible experience. The small boned, untiring work horses with their special saddles and stirrups never cease to impress tourists, as does the realisation that the cowboys are Indians. Who could ever forget the splendour, the colour, the dexterity exhibited by the vacqueros at Rodeo time.
The mighty Rupununi River with its abundance of accompanying wildlife is a tourist's delight. Any nearby farmstead can represent a tourist base. Bird watching in these areas offers literally hundreds of species. Ranches, like Pirara in the North Savannahs, have green undulating rivers next to the original sites of the pioneer farmsteads and guest houses of more recent construction, all of which are overlooked by the majestic Kanukus and Pakaraimas. Wet season or dry season, the Rupununi farmsteads reflect pristine and uncluttered beauty.
The Intermediate Savannahs with its undulating plains, dissected by the Berbice River and interspersed with lakes, has its own beauty. Subsistence farmers with a variety of crops stake claim to their rugged pioneer existence right next to the large livestock and crops undertakings at Dubulay and Ebini. Those tourists, local or foreign, who are interested in history, can visit Fort Nassau from bases located at either the agriculture research centre or Lidco's ranch at Ebini.
On another occasion we will deal with wildlife (as a part of agriculture - it is now a stepchild that falls incongruously under the Office of the President), not as an export article but as a tourist attraction in natura on game farms and in biodiversity parks.
These examples of agriculture connected sceneries which can be exploited within the context of promoting eco-tourism are but the tip of the iceberg. All it needs is the coming together of the main actors in the tourist-enticing drama with the focus and the conviction that agriculture is not only a producer of food, and the purveyor of rural wealth, but it is an exposition and integral part of rural beauty, ergo a tourist attraction.