MCRB and FFI began a week of multistakeholder workshops on sustainable tourism in Tanintharyi with a two day discussion focussed on Myeik District at the J&J Hotel on 15/16 May attended by around 60 local people involved in the tourism industry, and international and Myanmar tourism experts. Read more: http://www.myanmar-responsiblebusiness.org/news/tanintharyi-tourism-workshops.html

1. ROADMAP TO SUSTAINABLE
TOURISM IN TNI –
Working together for the
Tanintharyi
Responsible Tourism Strategy
Dr. Andrea Valentin
Fauna and Flora International

2. Why a strategy ?
• Tourism is set to become big
business in Tanintharyi. A strategy
allows for collective decisions on
tourism proposals
• The government and businesses
must share tourism growth and
prosperity with TNI locals
• If unplanned, tourism will bring
many problems

3. Purpose
• Raise the profile of tourism and ensure
decision makers are aware of its
importance and its drawbacks
• Highlight key issues that need to be
addressed in each destination
• Identify priorities and provide a
framework for action

4. How we undertake research
• FFI  environmental situation
• MCRB  gudilines on responsible business,
governance structures
• 108 one-on-one interviews with tourism stakeholders
(govt, businesses, CSOs in Dawei, Myeik, Kawthaung
districts) to identify opportunities and challenges for
tourism in TNI
• Consultation workshop in Dawei with 120
participants
• And now: consultation workshops in Myeik and
Kawthaung

5. National Tourism Trends
Source: ILO TNI assessment, 2017

6. Tourist arrivals in Tanintharyi
တနသ ာၤရီေ သသသို႔ ခရီီးသ ီးမ ီး လ ေရ ာကမမိုီီးေရ
• In 2012 Mergui had a total of 1,158 visitors – arrival through marine vessels
• ၂၀၁၂ခိုႏမစကတြက ၿမသတကာနကီးဆြကမ ီးသသို႕ြကလြကေရေရာ ြကီးမမတစကဆြကဆင့္ ေရ ာကရမသမမိုီီးေရ ၁၁၅၈ေြ ာကရမသခဆင့္႕ါသညက။
• After the opening of the Ranong/Kawthaung border (August 2013), the
number of arrivals increased substantially
• ရသဂိတကလ ၂၀၁၃ခိုႏမစကတြက ရေန ြကီးုႏမြကဆင့္ော ဆင့္ေသ ြကီးနြကစ႕ကာသိ ဖြကဆင့္လစကၿ႕ီီးေန ာက ခရီီးသ ီးလ သူုီီးေရ တသိီး႕ ီးခဆင့္႕ါသညက။
• MoHT data: ဟသိတြကုႏမြကဆင့္ခရီီးသ ီးလ ေရီးေနကရာီီးၾ နမမ ထိတကၿ႕နကေသ ာခာကာလာကမ ီး
MoHT in Lampi Ecotourism Plan (2015 - 2018)

7. Arrivals in Myeik
ILO Assessment TNI (2017)

8. The changing shape of
tourism
• Tourism in Tanintharyi has good prospects for
growth. BUT there will be winners and losers
• TNI must meet increased expectations of quality,
levels of service, activities  educational projects
for tourism stakeholders are most important
• Locals must be enabled to participate in tourism by
setting up SME businesses
• Government should offer flexibility in terms of
licensing tourism providers  encourage SME sector
expansion by opening up the local guesthouse
sector

9. Myanmar’s Tourism
Commitments
ၿမနကမ ုႏသိြကြ္ငံ၏ ာတညကၿ႕ဳထ ီးၿ႕ီီးေသ
ခရီီးသ ီးလိ႕ကြနကီးမူေါ မ ီး

10. Destination Tanintharyi
တနသ ာၤရီတသိြကီးာတြကီးရမသ ခရီီးသ ီးမ ီးလညက႕တကရနက ေနရ မ ီး

12. Dawei ထ ီးေြကၿမသဳု

13. Myeik ၿမသတကၿမသဳု

14. Myeik
• 9 registered accommodation providers, licensed for
foreigners
• Most tourists would take a day-trip to the
surrounding islands, or a three-day overnight trip 
due to govt restrictions, it takes up to 10 days to
receive permission to visit islands
• Impacts are visible already: commodification of
culture in Moken villages, waste problems, high
prices and perceived low value for money
 What are the most pressing issues to be addressed
by Myeik tourism stakeholders?

15. Kawthaung ော ဆင့္ေသ ြကီးၿမသဳု

16. Tanintharyi – Mainland
တနသ ာၤရီတသိြကီးငံ၏ ာဓသာာေသ ာိနကီးေၿမ

18. Tanintharyi’s tourism
resources
• Attractive landscape / seascape, stunning archipelago
• Special architectural (e.g. Dawei heritage) and socio-
cultural background of locals
BUT
What is the region’s identity?
o Moken ethnic people?
o Local fresh sea food?
o Fisherman lifestyle, fish markets?
o What?

19. Strengths Weaknesses
• Unique destination in the world, with pristine beaches
and striking fauna and flora
• Unique Moken culture
• Growing interest from local and international investors
• First national park eco-resort approved - Lampi
• High tour operator interest
• High local community interest in ecotourism
• High media interest
• Basic infrastructure for tourism exists
• Highly diverse destination: mountains, rivers, coastal
marine tourism, urban tourism, heritage sites (e.g. Dawei)
• General stakeholder support for developing sustainable
tourism
• Access – Restrictive Tourism Policy
• Few tourists currently visit the region
• Permissions required
• Benefits of tourism go to relatively few
• Infrastructure lacking, including marinas, piers
• Lack of tourism knowledge and skills
• Waste management basically inexistent
• Overfishing, dynamite and drip net fishing
• Deforestation
• Unclear regulations and weak enforcement
• Local communities have little engagement with tourism
• Seasonality
• Little dialogue between tourism stakeholders
• Little understanding on what sustainable tourism means
and each stakeholder’s role and responsibility
Opportunities Threats
• Job and income creation
• Using visitor entrance fees and permission funds for
conservation related activities
• Advancing environmental education programs through
sustainable tourism development
• Setting up functioning waste management system,
beginning with areas that are frequented by tourists
• Creating benefits for local population, e.g. through SME
business or community based tourism
• Reviving traditional culture by promoting meaningful
encounters between hosts and guests
• Engage local communities in conservation management
• Land speculation and land grabbing in the name of
tourism development
• Lack of public beach access
• Weak enforcement of environmental laws leading to
further depletion of fragile ecosystems
• Unsustainable development with little local benefits
• Commodification of culture
• Climate change: changes in temperature, precipitation, sea
level rise, flooding, erosion, loss of biodiversity
• High costs of developing accommodation on islands with
relatively few tourists
• Little tourism fees are used locally for conservation 
tourists not happy to
• Cruise tourism leading to economic leakage
• Political instability

20. The impacts of coastal tourism in TNI
႕ြကလြကာမကီးေၿခ ခရီီးသ ီးလိ႕ကြနကီးမ ီးငံ၏ သာကေရ ာကမမိမ ီး
• Risks to fragile ecosystems (reefs, mangroves, beaches, forests)
on which both tourism and local communities depend
o e.g. damage to coral from construction run-off, pollution, anchors, snorkelers; illegal
logging and sand mining
• Land/water use conflict between tourism, pearl fisheries,
fishing, other forms of economic activity (farming, timber)
• Protection of rights of Indigenous Peoples (Moken, Karen,
Tavoyan, others), including land cultural heritage sites, and
water/livelihood rights
• Lack of relevant national environmental
regulations/standards, and codes of conduct relating to
tourism infrastructure, particularly in coastal and marine
regions
• Need to generate funds for conservation (NB from March 2017
40% of boat fees will go to TRG, rest to Naypyidaw)

21. The impacts of coastal tourism in TNI
႕ြကလြကာမကီးေၿခ ခရီီးသ ီးလိ႕ကြနကီးမ ီးငံ၏ သာကေရ ာကမမိမ ီး
• Lack of clear governance and accountability, including for
tourism management
o There are many government authorities, and other stakeholders
o Delegated powers for regional government are not clear
o Unclear legal basis for action e.g. zonation?
• Need to ensure involvement of local business/investors and
communities (including genuine Community Based Tourism)
• Ensure public beach access
• Conflicting economic activity e.g. fishing, pearl farms, sand
dredging and mining
• Security issues and off-limits zones
• Legacy issues
o Proposed investment projects awaiting Tanintharyi government and/or Myanmar
Investment Commission decision and/or Environmental Compliance Certificate.
o Some existing planned projects may be in areas which should be demarcated for
low impact tourism only
o Land grabs

22. Examples of private sector impacts
ေ သခ္မ ီးမမ ာာဳသီးသာကေရ ာကမမိ ု႕မ မ ီး
• Some tourist resorts empty sewage and other wastes directly into water
surrounding coral reefs and other sensitive marine habitats
• ာခဳသုခရီီးသ ီးာ႕နကီးေၿဖေနရ မ ီးမမ ေရဆသိီးေၿမ ြကီးမ ီးၿဖြကဆင့္စနကု႔ထိတကၿခြကီး၊ စနကု႔႕စကာမသမိာကမ ီး
သုႏၱာေ ော ာကတနကီးမ ီးဆီသသို႔ တသိာကရသိာကေရ ာကရမသသ ီးၿခြကီး၊
• Careless boating, diving, snorkeling, and fishing can substantially damage
coral reefs – e.g. through touching, or dropping anchors (and not mooring)
• မဆြကမၿခြကေလမမ ီးေမ ြကီးၿခြကီး၊ ေရြိ႕ကၿခြကီးုႏမြကဆင့္ ြါီးဖမကီးၿခြကီးမ ီးမမ သုႏၱာေ ော ာကတနကီးမ ီးာသိ
႕ာကစီီးေစုႏသိြက႕ါသညက (ု႕မ ၊ ထသေတု႔ာသိြကတြကၿခြကီးမ ီး၊ ော ာကဆူီးာရာီီးစ ီးခၿခြကီးမ ီး)
• Marine animals are disturbed by increased number of boats
• ေလမာစီီးေရတသိီး႕ ီးလ ၿခြကီးေရာ ြကဆင့္ေရသတၱာေေါမ ီးာသိ႕ာကစီီးေသေရာေစုႏသိြက႕ါသညက
• Collection of marine souvenirs such as corals and shells can have negative
effects on the local environment
• သုႏၱာေ ော ာကတနကီးမ ီးုႏမြကဆင့္ခရိခ္မ ီးာသိာမမတကတရလာကေဆ ြကာတာကမလသိာ႕ကမ႕သိမသိရမ ေဖစိေဆ ြကီးၿခြကီးမ ီး
ကီးၿခြကီးမ ီးာလညကီးသမ ေ႕တကေနကီးာြကာသိထသခသိာကေစုႏသိြက႕ါသညက

23. A vision for tourism in
2020
A sustainable future, where healthy and clean
ecosystems support, and are supported by,
thriving local communities and a vibrant
economy
တ ေနကသသေသ ာန ဂတက၊ ာနကီးမ ော ြကီးမနကေသ ေဂဟ-
စနစကာေထ ာကာာူ၊ ေ သခ္ာသသိြကီးာေသိြကီးမ ီးငံ၏
ေသိြကီးေနကီးေထ ာက႕္ဆင့္မမိုႏမြကဆင့္ ော ြကီးမနကေသ စီီး႕ ီးေရီးတသိီးတာကမမိ

24. Agenda for action
Short Term (2017)
1. Draft Coastal Zonation Plan for Tourism and
Conservation Activities
2. Environmental/social standards for tourism
infrastructure
3. Strategic Development Plan for Tourism in Tanintharyi
…..Allows for decisions on existing/future
tourism proposals
Medium Term (2017-2020)
4. Possible UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Status for Myeik
Archipelago
5. Adopt a legal base for Zoning Plan
6. Establish Myeik Archipelago Destination Management
Organisation and Destination Management Plan

25. Immediate next steps
All stakeholders shall:
1. Contribute to the development of a comprehensive conservation action plan to
protect Tanintharyi’s reefs and forests;
2. Help include marine protected area management into TNI’s long-term planning
and policy;
3. Support the establishment of a network of marine protected areas for Tanintharyi
for the protection of biodiversity and sustaining ecosystem goods and services.
• Through sustainable marine ecotourism development,
reach out to communities and take conservation action
o In encouraging community participation in conservation and tourism initiatives,
we can conduct various activities (e.g. ‘pride campaign’, site-specific education
programs)
• Encourage sustainable coastal resource use for tourism
o Coastal research and monitoring of tourism development
o Protected areas management with adequate infrastructure

26. Putting the strategy into
practice
EVERYONE HAS A ROLE TO PLAY
Government – businesses – local civil society groups –
NGOs, INGOs – local inhabitants
• The importance of partnership: (Guest Houses or
Hotels (Staffs are responsibility and active for tourist to
guide where they should visit and hidden
destinations..), Tour operators, Registered tour guides,
restaurant owners, Local authorities, Local fisherman’s
or villagers(Patrol Station need to cooperate with
them!).
• Monitoring: Local Gov, Tour Operators, INGO, NGO
and local people
• Review: Up to active suatainabale stakeholders…

27. Questions to you
• How would you define the ‘destination’: Myeik
Archipelago? What is TNI’s ‘identity’?
o And/or adjacent coastline?
o Include Launglon peninsula and Moscos Islands?
• Some common issues and approaches needed, some are different
• Who are the target markets?
o Ecotourists? European? Asian? Thai? Chinese?
o Domestic?
o Competing beach, island and diving destinations in the region – prices and
convenience
• What new tourism infrastructure is needed?
o International airport at Kawthaung?
o Inter-Island transport links?
o Coastal roads, cross-border links and coastal ‘jumping off points?
o Accommodation options?
o Restaurants, bars etc