Great leap backwards

The dust has settled from the closing of the tourism books for fiscal year 2005, in which the CNMI hosted just over half a million visitors; 529,557 of them to be precise.

Had the Commonwealth not fumbled away its tourism industry, that number would be over a million about now, and I’ve got the numbers to back that up. In fact, we’d have so many tourists that we’d be arguing over when to place a “cap” on tourism; our liberals (socialists) would whine that every footprint in the sand causes irrevocable harm to the world’s ecosystem, and attack articles would appear in the U.S. press about our “abuse” of stray boonie dogs, some of which have not received government-funded college degrees in Marxist anthropology, a clear violation of their civil rights.

Anyway, back to this 529,557 figure. It is a great leap backwards of 12 years!

Yes indeed, Bubba, that’s about how many tourists arrived in FY 1993; which is to say, our tourism industry now, based on raw bodies, is no bigger than it was in 1993. And you wonder why there are so few good jobs these days? Gee, I wonder why.

The benchmark by which to measure this great leap backwards is, by the way, to find a year of comparable arrivals that lies before, not after, the tourism peak year. So, FY 1993 is it for our benchmark and, counting on my fingers, that makes 12 years ago.

Tourism peaked in FY 1997 with 726,690 arrivals. Then, down it went. (Hey, I warned you way back then, you’ll recall).

The “Asian financial” crisis was blamed, but though it did cause an unavoidable bruise in the short term, it was a golden opportunity to grab as much market share from Guam as possible; the CNMI had the wage cost advantage, the distance advantage, and other advantages. When you are the low cost provider with an established brand and inroads into a contested market, that’s when you should fight, not sit on your butt and snort butane whifferdills all day.

So, what did the CNMI do? Well, butane city, baby, your tax dollars at “work.” It decided to turn its focus to the Russian tourism industry, thus neglecting Japan. It harassed the Korean tour agents with monomaniacal glee. It bad mouthed Japanese “package tourists” and said it wanted “independent travelers” (depending on how you interpret the data, about three out of every four Japanese tourists in the CNMI are package tourists). It played games with potential casinos. And it caused an international giggle-fest by floating ideas to build a choo-choo train (I’m not making this up), this as funding went wanting for more Japanese marketing efforts.

TOTAL, UTTER, INCOMPETENCE.

Tourism is, in summary, about half of what it would have been if things were done right, due, in large part, to the notorious econocrats, who have shown no shame, of course. And now you can see the great harm they caused, as you survey the Great Leap Backwards of 12 years.

Which leads to the next question: Can the million visitor mark ever be reached? On the current path, well, no… on the current path the Hotel Nikko will someday become a government owned housing project for low-income residents, and Coral Ocean Point will be a government-owned detention center for troubled youth.

THE REAL QUESTION…

OK, now for the real question: If the CNMI takes an intelligent path in addressing tourism, can the million visitor mark be hit? I say, yes. If I ran things, I’d make that a priority. However, this will be a far bigger project than most people realize, a crusade of years, so the question becomes (like everything else here) an issue of politics over economics. Business as usual ain’t going to cut it.

I’m no Monday morning quarterback on this, I am considered the leading expert in Commonwealth tourism economics, so I won’t deny that, since Amateur Hour isn’t going to improve things any. And this morning, as I make some of my occasional tweaks to the CNMI tourism forecasting model I wrote back in 1997, I recall a meeting I had in Malaysian Borneo that same year. I was consulting for a client in the eco-tourism niche there; but he was intrigued about Saipan so we bantered about it for a few moments.

I described all the great virtues, and potential, the CNMI enjoyed, though I also outlined the drawbacks posed by the Commonwealth’s notoriously bureaucratic mindset, which was, paradoxically, fueled by the very U.S. subsidies designed to help the Commonwealth. Anyway, it was refreshing to ponder the big picture in basic terms for a change.

“The CNMI is good for a million visitors, easy,” I said, “but… I don’t know if they want that.”

One of the client’s managers, a seasoned executive from Taiwan, swatted a mosquito on his forearm, gazed at the mangrove swamps north of the property, and said, “The story of most of the world, Mr. Stephens, is that progress is more reviled than failure.”

Why yes…yes, it is. And there’s a word for those places: Poor.

(Ed Stephens Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. E-mail him at Ed@SaipanEconomist.com.)