Growing Agri-heritage Tourism in Africa

Abstract

African nations have diverse and rich agricultural landscapes and systems, suggesting potential for a range of agri-heritage tourism offerings incorporating both tangible (e.g., built structures, landscape elements) and intangible elements (e.g., customs, beliefs, traditions, knowledge, language). This chapter considers the opportunities for growth of agri-heritage tourism in sub-Saharan Africa and provides two case studies of coffee tourism in Ethiopia and cocoa tourism in the Ivory Coast. Along with the above opportunities, we identify the potential for indigenous and traditional food crops to feature in agri-heritage tourism initiatives in Africa, capitalising on global trends in food production and consumption that have seen a revisiting of traditional sustainable approaches to producing food, as a means of coping with climate change and as an antidote to our widespread poisoned agri-industrial systems. Agri-heritage tourism may provide opportunities to diversify income streams, offering employment and income security for farms reliant upon unstable and unprofitable globally determined prices for their produce. However, barriers exist to the development of agri-heritage tourism, linked to a lack of inter-sectoral synergy between the agriculture and tourism sectors. Likewise, infrastructural, financing, product development, and marketing challenges exist, producing challenges for optimising livelihood benefits for the many small-holders who characterise the agriculture sector in Africa.