Kapok: Aiming higher

Reference documents and generic resolutions adopted by the United Nations are usually dismissed by critics as either too broad, too generous or too normative, and sometimes the three together. Then they are often simultaneously considered rather weak when it comes to binding effects and even weaker when considering enforcement. Of course, there are exceptions, especially when peace, security, trade and sometimes international justice are concerned, but more often than not timing and whether or not powerful states get involved remain crucial and can prove either incapacitating or, on the contrary, expediting.

Yet, when it comes to global concerns — in particular the protection of the environment, but not only! — there are no better institutions than UN agencies to come up with eloquent and insightful perspectives. Such is the case with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that succeeded the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015. MDGs were broader and less numerous — 8 goals with 21 targets, whereas SDGs comprise 17 goals to be achieved by 2030 — but marked a turning point in the UN drive to be more results-oriented and multi-dimensional as well as inter-related in its approach to development — the United Nations Development Programme stresses that “often the key to success on one will involve tackling issues more commonly associated with another.”

Reviewing whether or not the claim that MDGs had been the “most successful anti-poverty movement in history”, analysts concluded in 2015 that even though it was quite an overstretch to proclaim “mission accomplished”, crucial progresses had indeed been made: the number of people living on less than $1.25 had been more than halved even though the same ambition for people suffering from hunger was not fully realized; net enrolment rate in primary school had reached 91% (not fully universal, but pretty close); two-thirds of developing countries had achieved gender parity in primary education; child mortality rate as well as global maternal mortality had dropped by about 50% but had failed to drop by two-thirds; number of new HIV carriers had fallen by 40%, even though the spread had not been reversed as promised; but then halving the proportion of people without access to clean water had been achieved five years in advance and overseas development aid to developing countries had increased drastically by about two-thirds over the period.

There is thus hope for the SDGs, and reading reports from numerous Non-Governmental Organizations and International Organizations on a regular basis, I can testify to the fact that the renewed and more ambitious goals for the next decade have permeated all kinds of institutions, and help create a new consensus on what needs to be done.

Labor conditions and employment — a subject dear to my heart — are now covered by the standalone Goal No. 8 in the SDGs whereas they use to be minimalistically embedded and split inside the goals to eradicate poverty and achieve gender parity under the MDGs. The full name of the new goal actually resonates like a program in itself as the ambition is to “promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.” Under one goal stand some 10 targets, to which are appended 17 indicators that will allow policy-makers and citizens to assess the progress made towards the goal. And besides the usual GDP growth or unemployment rate, one finds the latest concerns related to the worrying spread of urban informal employment, all forms of discrimination affecting hourly earnings, fatal and non-fatal occupational injuries with a breakdown by gender and place of origin (migrants), and even the level of national compliance with labor rights (freedom of association and collective bargaining) based on the International Labor Organization conventions.

Quite interestingly, this goal also comprises a recommendation to “devise and implement policies to promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products,” an objective that the Macao Government Tourism Office could easily make a requirement — why not even for the renewal of casino licenses — in order to make the ambition to become a “World Centre of Tourism and Leisure” slightly more meaningful for the good people of our SAR.

Published in Macau Daily Times on May 24, 2019

Kapok: Liveable tourism

When designing or even reviewing policy-making, the whole process is bound to start with a discussion of sort. Whether it is a subdued exchange of views or a heated debate over contentious points, hard facts will mitigate opinions and inform the overall spin of the conversation.

When the figures for visitors coming to Macao in 2018 were released earlier this year, it was thus only logical that some legislators wanted to discuss the matter further: almost 36 million visitors coming to a place whose total population is only 650,000 does qualify our SAR for the “overcrowded” category — we are talking about 100,000 daily visitors on average. This is also what is often referred to as “overtourism” these days. Mind you, this is not a new topic, and since Macao has breached the symbolic threshold of 30 million visitors in 2014, the idea of having daily quotas of tourists or restrictions regarding back and forth movements have been regularly aired.

Some very touristy “enclosed spaces”, such as islands or walled cities, have already taken drastic moves by substantially restricting sudden surges of visitors. Among the most well-known examples are Dubrovnik in Croatia and Santorini in Greece, and in both cases the cruise-ship stopovers were the main targets of these restrictions — what really distort everything being the massive arrival of day visitors.

Despite all the hype about Macao becoming a “world center of leisure and tourism” and the magic formula of “integrated resorts” for new casinos to develop, the average length of stay in Macao is still 1.3 days and it took years to go beyond 1.1!

What is indeed more troubling is that someone representing the food and beverage sector and by extension the hospitality industry, such as legislator Chan Chak Mo, would simply refuse to discuss the issue, and dismiss it on the ground that it is impossible to choose the tourists who visit our SAR. He thus concluded that residents “need to just get used to them.” This is not only irresponsible, but it goes against the latest reflections from the industry itself.

Macao participates in the activities of the World Travel and Tourism Council, and several events of the Council, which represents the Travel & Tourism private sector globally, have actually been held in our SAR. All the research produced by the Council and the global summit it organizes are of course largely concerned by the economic impact and the mega-trends in the growth of the tourism industry, but the overall perspective is lined-up with other concerns, long terms ones, and the Council has actually made the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals its latest guiding principles.

In its remarkable 2017 study entitled “Coping with Success: Managing Overcrowding in Tourist Destinations”, the Council indicated that “an essential element of a sustainable tourism strategy [was] to put the local community first”. Someone has got his priorities wrong!

But before even thinking of defining a strategy — even one that would be backed by the latest tools of a smart city — the proper diagnosis has to be made.

The report recommends nine metrics grouped under five categories to understand the potential risks: the overall context (importance of tourism and arrivals growth), the alienation of local residents (tourism density — visitors per square kilometer — and intensity — visitors per resident), the degraded tourism experience, the overloaded infrastructure (arrival seasonality and attraction concentration), the damage to nature (air pollution) and the threats to culture and heritage (historic site prevalence).

Interestingly enough, Macao was part of the study and ended up in the most at risk categories in four metrics out of nine, with one (air pollution) not being documented — one can wonder why. And then comes the difficult part: the solutions! Five directions have been identified, with several instruments available: visitors have to be smoothed over time, spread across sites, prices have to be adjusted to balance supply and demand, accommodation supply needs to be regulated and then, if that’s not enough, access and activities can be restricted.

Ultimately, the city has to be liveable if it wishes to remain attractive.

Published in Macau Daily Times on March 29, 2019

Kapok: Putting a cap

Greece roughly receives the same number of tourists as Macao;  around 32 million per year. Tourism in Greece represents about 20% of GDP and, directly or indirectly, provides a job to one Greek in four: easily imagined is the distress felt when this number fell to 10 million in the wake of the financial crisis in 2010.

Yet, because of the sheer pace of the rebound, people are starting to see (and feel) the negative effects the return of mass tourism is having not only on everyday life but also on tourism itself. Striking a balance between the imperative of “sustainable tourism” and the dangers of “overtourism” has become a necessity, and this despite a whopping 23% national rate of unemployment.

The stress imposed by this massive influx of tourists is even more revealing in the tiny islands of the Cyclades, and especially in the one from which I write: Santorini. When I first visited the iconic caldera exactly 40 years ago, one would necessarily arrive at the small pier of Skala from where one would have to climb 580 steep serpentine steps leading to Thira, the island’s capital, 260m up the cliff under an excruciating sun. Mules were available, but mainly to carry backpacks.

Now there is a cable car, and even though the mules are available for the occasional selfie, only the small connecting vessels from gigantic cruising ships make it to the old pier: island hoppers riding regular ferries arrive at Athinios, the new port, from which a road gives easy assess to the whole island. In short, one does not “deserve” his or her stay in Santorini anymore and during day (and sunset) time it has become nearly impossible to stroll along the dedalum of the tortuous vennels of Oia overlooking the volcano without bumping into packs of fellow visitors.

The marbled ridge path going from Thira to Firostefani feels like a shopping road of Mongkok on a busy Saturday afternoon and every single house has been turned into either a shop, a bar or a hotel — “boutique hotel” carries its true meaning in Santorini! Still small in size — one floor only — all are painted in immaculate white and the occasional marine blue to safeguard the visual coherence of the whole. Yet, Santorini’s mayor Nikolaos Zorzos laments that “11% of the island has been concreted over.”

Two million visitors on a tiny island of 76 square kilometers is proving too much for the 25,000 inhabitants: not only the traffic jams and the overcrowding are proving problematic, but also the fast-rising water and energy bills. Thus Zorzos, among other things, has taken the bold decision to limit the number of cruise visitors per day to just 8,000, down from as much as 18,000 in the past. Zorzos also illustrates the imbalance of the development of the tourism industry by highlighting that there are now 1,000 hotel rooms per sq. kilometer in Santorini, more than any nearby island. I wonder what the Aegean mayor would have to say about Macao where the supposedly “green lung” of Coloane shrinks by the day and the number of hotel rooms stands at 1,250 per sq. kilometer. Are problems different depending on longitude?

In the 2017 report “Coping with Success: Managing Overcrowding in Tourist Destinations” by the World Travel and Tourism Council, challenges posed by overtourism appear to be the same everywhere: alienation of local residents, degradation of tourist experiences, overloading of infrastructure, damage to nature and threats to culture and heritage. Among the measures recommended by the WTTC, of which Macao is part, figures the capping of daily visitors. Macao might not be as bad as Venice, but it does belong to the category of hotspots with the highest risk of over-crowding, similar to Dubrovnik where visitor numbers per day has already been capped even beyond the recommendations by UNESCO, from which Macao derives its World Heritage status.

Published in Macau Daily Times on July 13, 2018

Catching mice...

Wow, wow, wow! MICE [Meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions] DSEC statistics for 2015 are out, and guess what, the number of events (909) is up by a staggering 116 y-o-y! Of course, with only MOP$232 million of receipts (including MOP$127 million of public funding) for the whole of 2015, this is equivalent to a bit less than 9 hours of gambling revenues in 2015 (with a bit more than MOP$230 billion for 2015, GGR per hour, despite the dwindling figures, is about MOP$26.35 million...). Also, in terms of number of attendees and participants, there is a drop of 4% to 2.48 million, whereas in Vegas, out of comparison, there were 5.89 million participants in 21,306 conventions and meetings held in 2015. So, Macao is holding 23 times less events than in Vegas but is attracting about 2/5 of the Vegas' attendees! For revenues, it is difficult to compare as Vegas mixes CAT (Casino Tourism) and MICE! But as pointed out by Carlos Siu Lam and John Crossley: "Efforts should be dedicated to creating a unique image and destination experience for Macao under the current resource constraints, rather than simply imitating Las Vegas. Offering different kinds of products is a key aspect in this regard. In a nutshell, the diversification of the tourism and casino industry in a gaming jurisdiction relies on its ability for: (1) enriching its products and services; (2) diversifying its customer mix; and (3) differentiating its image from that of its competitors." This concurs with the conclusions of the PwC report on Building Better Cities...

Kapok: Progress vs. growth

Ask any resident in Macao and you will probably get the same answer: Chinese New Year has become a real nuisance for our territory, mainly because of the massive arrival of tourists, all channeled along the “axis of consumption” in the city center—and here I am not even plowing into the officially orchestrated permit to pollute the air and the ears of passers-by in the form of a pyrotechnic extravaganza that is truly scaring the dead as well as the living! 
According to the Public Security Police, 915,275 visitors entered Macau between January 31 and February 5, 73% of whom came from the mainland. Overall, that means that one and a half times the total population of Macao entered the territory in less than a week, or close to a third stepped in every single day. Extrapolating from the figures of 2013 (altogether 29.3 million visitors for the whole year), 51% of this massive influx consists of day-trippers: no wonder then that the public transport system is overloaded and the streets jammed when those hasty sightseers have to be carried back to the border-gate on the same day!
Here and there, I have been reading several articulated criticisms regarding this free-flow of tourists into Macao that emphasise the “unsustainability” of the whole situation.
To the drastic measures oriented-ones who remark that in any case more than 70% of Macau’s gambling revenue is derived from VIP tables and that high-rollers tend to deliberately avoid Chinese New Year for the annoyances it brings I say: yes, sure, and yet SMEs are not to be forgotten, and here we are talking about far more than just the over-inflated cosmetics, dry cakes, beef jerky and milk powder outlets. Countless small restaurants and shops actually benefit from the pendulum-like daily invasion, and knowing the importance of “gift-giving” in Chinese culture, I am pretty sure that there is even more room for growth in this area. Of course, that means that some of the heavily visited spots should be “reserved” or “pre-empted” by the government for these small operations to obtain without having to pay hefty rent prices—a preemption based on the multi-pronged sustainability of the project more than the nationality of the operator. 
Clearly put, the ousting of the Cultural Club on San Ma Lo in January or the vacating at the end of 2013 of the Yellow House next to St Paul’s Ruins to make way for the global fashion brand Forever 21 should have been prevented—in the latter case, the Yellow House is owned by Future Bright Holdings, the company managed by legislator Chan Chak Mo, who is supposedly representing the “cultural sector” in the Legislative Assembly! 
The same line of reasoning goes for those who believe that this massive crowd should be funnelled exclusively, or at least mostly, to the Cotai strip: not only will it deprive SMEs of their fair share of the juicy pie, but it will also constitute a missed-opportunity for mass education as to how and why Macao is different from the rest of China—entertainment and the epitome of fake, however professional they are, will never replace culture… it’s like saying “don’t go to Boston if you’ve been to Vegas”! 
To those who, on the contrary, believe that things should be left to market forces and that ultimately tourists will get fed-up of feeling like subway customers at rush-hour in the open air and will thus come up with their own corrective measures, I say: you have no idea what human nature can endure and for how long it can do so in a nation that has been deprived of holidays for 50 years… visit the Yellow Mountain in Anhui province on any given day, and you will get my meaning!
Something needs to be done, that’s for certain, and all the touristic places in the world are faced with the same challenges—83 million Chinese tourists went abroad in 2012, and that number is set to reach 200 million by 2020. Spreading the visitors out across the year and thus imposing quotas is inescapable. It is high time that our GDP indicator be coupled with a Genuine Progress indicator, taking into account social and environmental costs. 
If Bhutan can design and fare well in a Gross National Happiness indicator while still controlling the number of entries to its tiny and modest kingdom, so why can’t Macao, cash-ridden as it is?

Published in Macau Daily Times, February 7th 2014