Botswana Wants Tourists, Within Limits : Africa: President Quett Masire says his nation’s attractions are ecologically fragile and must be protected. He also hopes to broaden the economic base.

Botswana, fighting a recession that has badly hit its tourism industry, faces the difficult task of luring more visitors from abroad and protecting its fragile ecology from over-exploitation.

With foreign earnings down 19% so far this year, the landlocked southern African country is anxious to pull in more tourist dollars and is trying to sell itself beyond the borders of its traditional European marketplace.

“We are treading a fine line between trying to create jobs and trying to protect the environment,” said a Gaborone-based conservationist. “We need the foreign exchange, we need the jobs, but not at any price.”

The numbers of tourists visiting the country grew by 22% from 1989 to 1990, but only by 6.5% between 1990 and 1991. Botswana attracted 1.4 million tourists in 1990, compared with only 614,000 a decade earlier.

“People come to Botswana for the wildlife, the scenery and its political stability,” said Tutu Tsiang, the country’s tourism director.

Botswana President Quett Masire told a recent opening of a game lodge in Chobe National Park, home to vast herds of elephant and buffalo, that tourism had enormous potential but that Botswana wanted to keep a check on the numbers of visitors.

“There is a need for us to explore alternative economic areas which have strong capacity to generate foreign revenue earnings. In short, we should not put all our eggs in one basket,” he told reporters.

“Our main tourist products, the wildlife, wilderness and the Okavango Delta, are inescapably tied to the environment. It is therefore important that we take into consideration the fragility of the ecology on which our tourist products are based,” he said.

To achieve this, the president said, Botswana needs to maintain a “reasonable limit” on the numbers of tourists using its attractions.

Tsiang said Botswana is eager to continue attracting tourists from its main markets--recession-hit Britain and Germany--but needs visitors from other countries.

“We are looking both closer to home and further afield,” she said in an interview. “We are taking part for the first time in a tourism fair in Dakar, Senegal, and are looking for a suitable fair in the United States.”

Tourism, which makes up less than 3% of Botswana’s gross domestic product, is one of the major employers in this largely desert country, home to 1.3 million people.

But formal employment in the tourism sector grew by less than 5%--from 5,180 to 5,438--in the year ending March, 1992, compared to a 45% increase the previous year.

But many thousands more are employed in the informal sector. In the remote northern area, which takes in Chobe Park and the unspoiled Okavango Delta, more than 40% of the jobs are linked to tourism.

“We had to contend with the Gulf War and now the recession,” Tsiang said, “but we are hoping things will get better with our new drive for tourists.”