Socio-cultural consequences of agrotourism

Abstract

National and international tourism consists to a great extent of towns people from heavily urbanized areas wanting to relax, to forget the narrow world of the city streets, to breathe fresh air, and to see perhaps even to learn something new. Agrotourism offers all that. It is an addition to resort tourism and posh hotels, it opens a region and all the people living there for tourism. However, there 1s no chance that the people and their sociocultural and socio-economic way of life in an area concerned will not be touched and will remain unaffected. The paper will discuss the possible positive and negative results of agrotourism on the rural areas in Malaysia by taking into account international experiences in Europe, Africa and the ASEAN. Models on how to plan and to promote agrotourism, how to emphasize the positive results and to minimize the negative side-effects will be demonstrated and discussed. Filters to avoid socio-cultural and environmental pollution have to be considered as early as possible so that the follow-up costs will not cream off the economic gain in the domestic balance. The principle of an environmental-acceptability-study including the aspects of an intact socio-cultural environment will be introduced. Ways to put the specific Islamic cultural tradition of Malaysia into advantage for promoting agrotourism will be discussed and the paper will try to show how to use agrotourism for revaluing nearly forgotten cultural inheritance in substance. Agrotourism in this paper will be considered as some kind of 'soft tourism' putting a certain emphasis on the fact to maintain the socio-cultural way of life in rural areas, as an incentive for tourists to experience traditional values by having a chance to live amidst the rural people as their guests for a short while.