The Financial Times echoes positive, cautious vibes for tourism in Fiji

The Financial Times’ Siddarth Shrikanth wrote a piece titled: Diving in paradise: Fiji Comes Back to Life. The engrossing article, published on February 19, tells of his adventure to our shores at two of Fiji’s best dive and shark spots – the Rainbow Reef in Taveuni and Beqa lagoon.

It vividly describes his experience on Taveuni, the island hospitality, catering prepared by the village women enriched with fruits and vegetables with a whiff of coconut milk and his diving spree.

In Beqa, while swimming with the sharks, the conservation writer challenges the need to use supplementary feed for the selachimorpha. He was told by the dive guide that while it was still a controversy, in the latter years before the shark dives, the local fishers used to make a living out of the sharks.

The pristine and natural beauty of Fiji were summed up in this article but central to this is how our island nation should tread on commercial tourism more carefully to seek ways of a more sustainable tourism direction.

In fact, like the Viani Bay Resort, there are many other tourism establishments and operations like it.

Additionally, the article shed light on developed countries, with their giant share of the global carbon footprint must do their part to help fund adaptation. This, so that island nations like ours can mitigate the threats of climate change.

Fiji, in this post-pandemic period, is riding on a wave of opportunity as tourist numbers, even in the off-peak season, are looking up.

The Minister for Commerce, Trade, Tourism and Transport, Faiyaz Koya, said that at the pace of tourism arrivals in recent months, the projection stood at 400,000 for 2022.

Now that’s a huge leap from the 31,680 visitors in 2021 and an improvement from the record-high number of 894,389 in 2019.

Regardless of the figures, The Financial Times piece is another reminder that even while our economy is on its way to recovery, it must not be at the expense of our environment.

We report more tourism developments, and more businesses are either in the pipeline or taking off.

With stakeholders both from Government and the private sector doing their bid to ensure that these operations comply with environmental laws, as individuals and developers we must also take note and observe.

In this instance the saying ‘Leave the world better than you found it’, is befitting of our individual roles as custodians of the land, sea, and sky.