This photo from January 20, 2021 shows a bed and breakfast on Liuqiu Island in southern Taiwan. (Kyodo)



This photo from January 20, 2021 shows Hsu Po-han (left), President of the Liuqiu Island Tourism Association, and his father in their hotel restaurant. (Kyodo)



This photo from January 20, 2021 shows a bed and breakfast on Liuqiu Island in southern Taiwan. (Kyodo)

TAIPEI (Kyodo) – Directly off Taiwan’s southwest coast is a seven square kilometer coral island. Liuqiu Island, called Little Ryukyu by the Japanese and Lambai Island after a language that was once spoken by indigenous peoples, is now home to 12,000 people who until recently lived mainly from fishing.

This began to change in the 1990s when fish stocks declined and young islanders increasingly chose not to join the family business. Instead, they opted for less precarious livelihoods, which usually meant moving to one of Taiwan’s larger urban centers.

But some stayed, including entrepreneurs who tried to expand the island’s economic base by tapping into the region’s growing tourism market.

Progress was slow at first, but picked up speed in 2004 when the island was included in the Dapeng Bay Conservation Project. By 2010, five hotels had grown to 50.

According to Hsu Po-han, president of the island’s tourist board, 400 hotels host 400,000 visitors annually, drawn to the island’s sunny beaches, commonly known as Hsiaoliuqiu, exotic wildlife and relaxed lifestyle.

The benefits of tourism are hard to overstate.

Not only does tourism make up for financial losses when fishing decreases, it also provides jobs in hospitality – hotels, restaurants, rental cars and diving clubs – as well as in construction, administration and at home for young people who would otherwise leave. and professional services.

Taxing hundreds of new businesses has resulted in improvements in infrastructure, schools, social services, and a thriving new corporate image as older buildings are redesigned and new ones erected, often with the help of fancy design firms from nearby cities in Taiwan.

However, tourism has also brought problems, some specific to the island and others to an industry that many communities in Taiwan and elsewhere have turned to when the forces of modernization are undermining traditional ways of life.

Most obvious are problems that arise from tens of thousands of people staying in a place where public works have been designed for the needs of a village.

In some cases, solutions only required system updates. To cope with the increase in wastewater, for example, three new wastewater treatment plants were built, which, according to project manager Wang Yi-shuan, will process 80 percent of the larger volume on the island.

Faced with a similar increase in garbage, which was 23 tons a day in high season, officials arranged for it to be transported to the main island for incineration. To reduce air and noise pollution, they are subsidizing the purchase of electric scooters, whose fleets allow visitors to travel cheaply, said Chen Kuo-tsai, community leader of Hsiaoliuqiu.

However, other problems have proven to be more difficult.

Plastic food packaging combines commercial interests with consumer negligence to create a mess that long-term harms the island’s reputation as a haven for naturalists.

While numbers are not available for the island alone, according to the Ocean Conservation Administration, 139,500 plastic bottles, 64,400 caps and 34,700 straws were collected on Taiwan’s beaches in 2019.

Efforts to reduce pollution at source have had limited impact as food service operators rely on single-use plastic items that cannot be exchanged for reusable items without incurring costs that would put them out of business.

While signs discourage litter and volunteer groups regularly clean up, the island’s shores remain littered with plastic. As Chen Yi-hua of Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Agency puts it, “consumer habits are very difficult to change.”

Aside from trash, tourists disrupt ecosystems by simply doing what tourists do. Swimming, boating and diving all threaten marine life, especially in the island’s delicate intertidal zones, where dozens of species live and reproduce.

The island’s environmental dilemma is perhaps best represented by green sea turtles featured in island marketing brochures. While few come ashore to lay eggs, 200 to 300 turtles eat in the shallow coastal waters, according to marine biologist Cheng I-Jiunn of the National Taiwan Ocean University, much to the delight of those actively seeking them.

But it is not only sea turtles that take in the garbage tourists they leave behind, often with fatal effects, but harassment by swimmers and divers scares the animals, risks injuries and scares them away.

Authorities have reacted vigorously to protect the island’s turtle population. The penalties are especially harsh to punish a person – fines and jail terms – and to get visitors to keep their distance. This could explain a recent surge in turtle numbers, Cheng said.

In a broader sense, access to areas designated as “vital habitat” has been limited to protect it from tourists who, while good for business, would destroy the very wildlife they see.

Cheng suggests such bans protect residents as well, as their once-isolated communities have been inundated by strangers, raising issues of privacy and the impact tourism has on relationships between islanders.

Even companies have begun to weigh the risks of unlimited expansion in an industry that is both seasonal and prone to economic instability. Hsu said island operators are considering how to limit development in a market that many see as saturated.

Tensions have also emerged between tourism and fisheries, which despite their decline, continue to make up the lion’s share of island income.

While the head of the fisheries association, Tsai Pao-hsing, criticizes the government’s policy for the current state of the industry, he also grumbles about tour boats in the harbors, saying that cleaning up beaches is useless because the plastic on the seabed drives fish away.

Such complaints are alleviated by pragmatism, however, as the island’s fishermen age quickly and many increase declining revenues by declining tours and renting rooms. None of the fishermen surveyed by Kyodo News regretted that their children had chosen not to follow in their footsteps.

Such an ambivalence towards changing times expresses Lee Bao-chu (71), whose husband died at sea some forty years ago. To support her five children, she opened a stall selling noodles, initially to fishermen and more recently to tourists who dominate their clientele.

Despite the noise of hundreds of scooters passing their booth every day, tourists are good for business, Lee said, and “they make things livelier.”

They also made it possible for her to grow old with her son who, like her daughters, would have looked for work elsewhere 20 years ago. Instead, he stayed and became a painter, a profession that is booming thanks to tourism.

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