ARGENTINA:
Women Open Gates to Rural Tourism

Marcela Valente


BUENOS AIRES,  (IPS) - Rural tourism in Argentina emerged in the mid-1990s in a bid to overcome the local agricultural crisis, and has established itself as a successful complementary business, one in which women hold the reins.

"The tourism business in the countryside is inconceivable without the involvement of women," says agricultural engineer Ernesto Barrera, director of a rural tourism graduate degree at the University of Buenos Aires, in which women make up the majority of students.

Argentina is one of the Latin American countries where "agritourism" has expanded the most, to the point that a year ago the National Agricultural Census was the first to include data about this activity, which moves some 100 million dollars a year.

The results of the 2002 census are not yet available, but the Tourism Secretariat reports there are around 900 rural establishments registered for this purpose, and they vary in size. But Barrera says there are closer to 2,000 agritourism locations, which can be found in all Argentine provinces.

The agritourist has a great deal to choose from. While ranches in Buenos Aires province provide a chance to milk cows or go horseback riding across the Pampas, those in the Argentine south allow visitors to try their hand at shearing sheep or go fishing in a landscape of rivers, lakes and snow-capped mountains.

The common factor is that "the family of the farmer, with their hospitality, is who receives the visitors in their own homes, and that is why it is very important that women carry the business forward," commented Barrera.

Such is the case of Susan Martí, who inherited land in Goyena, 600 km south of Buenos Aires. Her parents' house, built in 1920, had been closed up while farming and ranching of the land continued, but in 1994 she and her sister agreed to a proposal to reopen it.

"A company proposed setting up English language immersion programmes there, and later we were left with the infrastructure for lodging, so we opened the doors for rural tourism," Martí told IPS.

She has space for 40 people in seven rooms. "The focus is still the land. Tourism is a supplement," Martí stresses.

Her land, which maintains its long-standing name, 'La Nancy', is fully utilised, and the income from production could never be replaced by tourism revenues, she says.

Martí is a member of the board of the Argentine Rural Tourism Network, which represents some 100 people whose property is used for agritourism. Its offices are at the headquarters of the Rural Society, whose membership has traditionally been the country's major landowners.

The network's approach is that, in receiving tourists, the traditional work of the farm or ranch must be maintained. Tourism should not replace agricultural activities because "then it wouldn't be agritourism. It would be something else," said the co-owner of 'La Nancy'.

She agrees with the notion that women are the driving force behind agritourism. "The tourist who comes to the countryside wants to eat well, and in that sense women have a longer tradition of cooking or of coordinating kitchen duties." She also underscored the importance of creating a "comfortable" space for the visitor.

"I always say in teaching the class that if the woman in the family does not like receiving people in her home, attending to strangers, showing them the countryside and explaining the activities that are performed on the farm, then the business is not going to work," she said.

The idea of receiving tourists on ranches and farms emerged in the mid-1990s, when international prices for agricultural commodities were in a free-fall, causing a severe crisis in the sector. In many cases, rural producers had no alternative but to sell off their property and move to the city.

Those who were able to hang on found there was unmet demand among Argentine and foreign tourists who wanted to immerse themselves -- if only for a few days -- in the tranquil routine of the countryside, its silence and its people, who often seem to live in another era, far from the fast pace and dramatic changes of big cities.

"Rural tourism should always be a complementary business because if traditional farm activities were to disappear, it would no longer be authentic," says Barrera.

Visitors are attracted to uncontaminated nature and to another element that is a "scarce resource" in this globalised world: rural culture, which is kept isolated, with its unique qualities intact, he adds.

"Women are the owners or promoters of this business in 80 percent of the cases," says the expert. They are the majority in agritourism courses and among those who work with the tourists. "For men alone this is not a viable project. I advise them to dedicate themselves to something else."

Since rural tourism began, around a decade ago, it has grown an average of 15 percent a year, although there have been many failures along the way.

To learn from those mistakes, informational courses were set up at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology, and by 2000, the post-graduate degree got under way at the School of Agronomy.

The agritourism course is for university graduates, but each year the school reserves 15 percent of the admissions for students without university degrees. The latter tend to be rural producers who want to develop a specific project for their farm or ranch. Among the students are also entrepreneurs, tourism operators, economists, veterinarians, agronomists and lawyers.

Also participating are local officials who are interested in promoting rural tourism as a means to increase revenues in their districts and create jobs in the small towns, which are otherwise heavily dependent on work in the public sector.

This year's graduates will spend four months at rural tourism establishments, of varying levels of development, located in the northwestern provinces of Salta and Santiago del Estero, in the eastern Santa Fe and Corrientes, in Buenos Aires province and in Neuquén, in the south.