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Cleaning up Lake Toba
Since tourism does not play a major role in the local economy, the whole environment around Lake Toba and Samosir Island is not ready to serve a large number of foreign tourists because of the lack of even such basic facilities such as accommodations, clean toilets and healthcare services.
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A fisherman at Lake Toba, North Sumatra, Indonesia (Shutterstock/DH Saragih)
P
resident Joko “Jokowi” Widodo last week reiterated the government’s plan to accelerate the development of the 1,145 square kilometer Lake Toba and the 640 sq km Samosir Island lying at its center in North Sumatra into a world-class tourist destination.
His three-day visit to the world’s largest volcanic lake and its surrounding areas demonstrated the government’s commitment to the development of the tourism and hospitality industry as one of its top-priority working programs, besides infrastructure, deregulation and bureaucratic reform.
Indeed, as the world’s largest archipelago country with a vast diversity of cultures and rich in natural attractions and historic heritage, tourism is one of the most suitable businesses Indonesia can develop because of the multiplier effect and labor-intensive nature of its operations. Travel-related businesses such as hotels, restaurants, transportation, handicrafts and cultural shows are all labor intensive, the very kind of businesses needed to absorb the huge pool of job seekers.
But decades of ignorance on the part of the central government and local administrations and the dire poverty of the local people make it an uphill challenge to clean up the lake and its surrounding areas that have been severely polluted by tens of thousands of floating fish cages and even big fish and pig farming companies.
Closing the fish farm cages that spew a stench of rotten fish would require well-planned resettlement programs to provide new means of livelihood for the tens of thousands of fish farmers. Revoking the licenses of the companies that have been polluting the lake may land the government in the administrative court.
But without first cleaning up the lake, it is futile to promote it as a tourist destination especially for high-spending travelers from the United States and Europe, even though the travel time from Medan, North Sumatra’s capital, to Lake Toba was cut from four hours to one hour after the opening of an international airport at Silangit in 2017.
Since tourism does not play a major role in the local economy, the whole environment around Lake Toba and Samosir Island is not ready to serve a large number of foreign tourists because of the lack of even such basic facilities such as accommodations, clean toilets and healthcare services.
The second biggest challenge is the quality of services for tourists. Hence, of importance are the skills of hotel workers and the change of the mindset of the local people, who are now mostly farmers and fishermen, to gear them up to enter the service industry.
Service quality is so important that foreign tourists often are willing to tolerate minor infrastructure deficiencies to enjoy the serene, natural beauty and other attractions in a destination area.
We think Lake Toba would never develop into a world-class tourist destination without the participation of foreign and domestic investors. Local accommodation facilities need to tie up with international hotel chains for management and marketing, as many hotels in Bali do.
International hotel chains, which do not own the property, can provide good training to enable workers to provide the kind of services needed by tourist around the world and market local properties through their global networks.
