Carrying capacity

There is a very telling photo of Boracay that captures its problem. It shows Boracay from the air, looking like any neighborhood in Kyusi or Pasay or Mandaluyong. No one would have guessed it is the most beautiful island in the world.

If the three Cabinet members in charge of the Boracay clean-up know what they are doing, they have to take this rare and expensive opportunity to address the real problem: unregulated growth that breaches the island’s carrying capacity.

The President must also ban all new and even current construction of facilities that will aggravate the situation. DENR Secretary Cimatu is right in saying he doesn’t want any new establishments there.

This means, no new mega gambling casino even from the President’s Chinese friends should be allowed. Double Dragon and Megaworld should be stopped from carrying out planned developments in Boracay.

 Any new mega development should be redirected to the mainland of Aklan. Indeed, Ramon Ang who built the Caticlan Airport, has plans of building a convention hotel not on Boracay itself, but in Caticlan. Guests can go to the Boracay beaches during the day and go back to the hotel in Caticlan at night to party or to sleep.

We also forget we have 7,100 islands and many are as beautiful if not more beautiful than Boracay. Perhaps because most of our attention had been focused on Boracay, other islands with similar tourism potential remained undeveloped. It is like Imperial Manila sucking most of the economic opportunities from the other regions.

The key lesson for Philippine tourism we should learn from the Boracay experience is the need for sustainability. Government allowed anyone who wanted to exploit the island to just take what they can for as long as they could. The day of reckoning has come.

This reminds me of the tourism strategy of Bhutan, a small country in the Himalayas. Rosan Cruz, my long time associate in the world of corporate communications, just returned from a trip there and she was impressed with how they approach tourism.

Of course Bhutan is a small country that’s difficult to visit and what works with them may not work with us. Still, they have ideas on sustainability we should learn.

Bhutan does not officially limit the number of tourists they allow into the country, but they have instituted policies that go for quality than quantity... high value, but low impact. Their annual number of visitors is just about 100,000.

Rosan related to me that there are two main things Bhutanese tourism policies protect: the environment and their culture. She said the country is very green with lots of trees… lots of nature. Bhutan is also very colorful with the citizens required to wear traditional dress daily.

Tourists come in by Druk Air, which has limited flights from selected Asian cities. According to epicureandculture.com/bhutan-tourism-model/ “all visitors must pay a daily tariff, starting at $200 per day during the low season.

“However, the daily tariff involves most necessary expenses during a trip, including a three star hotel, all meals, a licensed Bhutanese tour guide, internal transportation, and equipment for treks. About $65 from this daily tariff is considered ‘sustainable tourism’ royalty which is used towards the country’s free health-care and education, as well as the building of tourism infrastructure.”

Rosan told me their tour guide studied abroad at government expense and spends a lot of time with his family. Their government is concerned about Gross National Happiness rather than the usual GDP number we worship.

The same website observed that: “The slow increase of tourism has allowed infrastructure to grow accordingly, without destroying the environment…”

Oh well… the Himalayas had always had this image of Shangri-la to many of us. For those of us who live at sea level, we have to deal with the dirty challenges inflicted upon us by fast growing and undisciplined populations.

We cannot make Boracay into a Shangri-la, but we must correct the damage from unregulated greed and growth. Otherwise, closing Boracay for a year will be a useless exercise.

Oil in Cebu?

The energy department is excited about what they claim is a commercial oil discovery in Cebu. I hope they don’t intend to drill for oil in the trading floor of the stock exchange. Remember Redeco and its successors?

This is an old story. We have drilled and confirmed the presence of oil in Cebu during the old PNOC days and found out it wasn’t commercial. But that didn’t stop some people from hyping the “find” and making a lot of money from clueless stock market investors.

They had been extracting oil from that area at a very low rate of one barrel a day and selling to small scale users of bunker oil for years. I doubt that the new Chinese operator has new technology for enhanced oil recovery. The current leadership of the energy department should manage expectations to protect people from speculators.  

In 2015, a clueless president of PNOC-EC told reporters they are declaring a discovery of a gas field in Isabela as they managed to draw gas from a well they drilled.

Of course there is gas there. PNOC discovered a limited amount of natural gas in that area decades ago. I know because I had to work that Sunday when we reported it. The gas reserve was only good for a small power plant that served the town for a few years.

During the Arroyo administration, then energy secretary Vince Perez was excited by a natural gas find in Victoria, Tarlac. I told him we have drilled that area and if there was something there, we would have found it because Victoria was the hometown of then energy secretary Ronnie Velasco.

But Vince was so sure about it. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because he might have new technical data. As it turned out, I was right. Nada!

 Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco.