Leisure Agriculture in the Era of Alternative Tourism
Tsai-Fa(TF) Yen *
Department of Tourism Management, College of Tourism and Urban-Rural Planning, Xichang University, Sichuan, China.
Jianlin Xiong
Department of Urban-Rural Planning, College of Tourism and Urban-Rural Planning, Xichang University, Sichuan, China.
Yu-Ming Yan
Department of Tropic Agriculture and International Cooperation, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The concept of alternative tourism mainly focuses on reducing the impacts to the tourism development on the ecological environment and driving the tourism industry into the direction of the sustainable development through different types of tourism mode (activities), such as agricultural tourism, rural tourism, industry tourism, and cultural tourism, etc. However, fewer studies discuss the feasibility of leisure agriculture as a possible tool of alternative tourism. The objectives of this study is to verify the advantages of alternative tourism and to assess the feasibility of leisure agriculture as a possible tool of alternative tourism based on literature review. Findings show that the development of leisure agriculture will have positive and negative impacts on the rural environment, economy and social culture. In general, the positive benefits outweigh the negative ones. Therefore, leisure agriculture is one of the feasible tools to achieve the purpose of developing alternative tourism, and the development of leisure agriculture is indeed one of the feasible alternatives to tourism.
Keywords: Alternative tourism, leisure agriculture, environmental impact