Nepal Considers Entering A New Market – Agro-Tourism

“Nepal government initiates the agro-tourism hub” (Sapkota, R. 2019) is an article published on Himalayan times which indicate that Nepal is considering to enter a new market called Agro-tourism. As per article, Nepal is setting up a mega agro-tourism project in Udaypur of province 1. This means Nepal is preparing itself for the Agro-tourism market which already gained a lot of popularity around the world.

Now, what is Agro-tourism? To define in simple terms, Agro-tourism is a collaboration of agriculture and tourism. For example, fishing, hunting, cooking classes, wine tasting, u-pick operations, roadside stands, harvest festivals, rice plantations etc. are some of the agro-tourism activities around the world. Since Nepal is an agricultural country, such market may carry a high potentiality for enhancing economic growth.

But entering a new market is not an easy task. Why? Because a detailed study needs to be performed which may lead to identification of several possible scenarios. Among these possibilities, each scenario demands for an analysis with the help of available data. During the whole process, there may present several internal and external factors essential to determine the feasibility of Agro-tourism market.

Talking about the internal factors, these are under the influence of the business itself for e.g. financial resource like funding and investment, source of income, physical resource like building, equipment, facilities etc. But the challenge is identifying and analyzing the external and environmental factors. With an inverse nature compared to internal environment, external and environmental factors directly influence the business ability to attain their goals and objectives in an optimized way. For example, socio-demographic situation like lack of infrastructure, economic and political situation of a country, frequent changing technologies, ecological factors like earthquake etc.

As mentioned earlier about the severity of new market, this require better strategy plan and its formulation. A popular method of strategy could be SWOT analysis which stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats. This may help to identify the feasibility of Agro-tourism market in general.

Strengths :

Fulfillment of expert human resource needed for Agro-tourism could be a strength. This is due to increase in educated younger workforce (annual literacy rate increased by 34.7% in 2015) and focus of government on agro-tourism research and education under Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science (IAAS). Other strength could be the collaboration with international interns and employees specialized in Agro-tourism field. This may enable the transfer of knowledge and the experience within the employees.

Weakness:

As mentioned earlier, Agro-tourism is a niche market. One could not predict how the market will react in coming years as there is no data. Limited information may function as a weakness for Nepalese industry. In addition to that, limited marketing on Agro-tourism could also be considered a weak point because without marketing, it is not possible to grab the proper attention from the agricultural firms and tourism industry. This will compel Nepal to focus on how to enhance its capacity on marketing field and how to access more data for better decision making.

Opportunities:

Nepal is facing the political stability in the recent years. With the stable government, Nepalese economy is rising slowly. A recent visit of China’s president to Nepal and several multilateral agreements with neighboring countries opened the door to future prosperity and strong Nepalese economy. This signals as the right time to enter a new market such as Agro-tourism which is further supported by the coming tourism year 2020 as announced by Nepal.

Threats:

One possible threat could be grabbing the attention of small agricultural firms and helping them adopt Agro-tourism. Another barrier is geographical difficulty in Nepal. There may be certain visitors (children, older people etc.) who may not prefer to travel to such remote areas which may lack basic infrastructures like roads and electricity. Therefore, Nepal needs to analyze how to inform the small agricultural firms about the agro-tourism and how Nepal could attract visitors to such challenging landscapes. 

After having a general look on Agro-tourism market through SWOT, this may be the market with future possibility. But the threats are also big on small agricultural firms and marketing side. Nepal needs to be ready to deal with coming challenges related to Agro-tourism market as it may be a positive by-product for both tourism and agricultural industry.