MOSCOW, September 27 (Itar-Tass) — Development of a tourism cluster in the North Caucasus may influence positively the region’s economic, social, political and cultural development, Russia’s leading expert in strategic development of the North Caucasus, Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of international economic relations Svetlana Lipina said.
“The Caucasus has a unique combination of natural conditions, which are favourable for turning it into a mighty recreation centre of Russia, which, first of all is caused by the contents and quality of the climate, balneological and recreational resources, concentrated at a rather limited area,” she said commenting on organisation in the region of a diversified tourism cluster.
The fundament to develop tourism there is reconstruction and development of the economy’s real sector, development of small and medium businesses, and most importantly – development of food and agricultural sectors.
“It is important to organise in North Caucasus new jobs, to organise new modern enterprises, to use the entire potential of the local human resources, to consider not only the high educational level of the locals, but also their traditions and mentality,” Lipina told Itar-Tass.
At the same time, she stressed that “over implementation of the tourism project, it is necessary first of all to pay attention to agriculture, which is developed badly in the region, where over half of the population live in villages; as well as inefficient transport, social and industrial infrastructures.” Another major aspect for successful implementation of the large-scale tourism project in the region is security.
“In order to provide high level of security for tourists and businesses it is necessary to plan not only large-scale development of modern systems preventing emergency situations, or have additional staff and equipment, to improve monitoring of hazardous natural processes and phenomena and organisation of tourism police, but it is necessary to achieve full control of conflict situation in the North Caucasus,” she said. “In this aspect everything depends on the state of civil society, on smooth activities of the law enforcement system.”
No doubt, that without solving the problem of unemployment, not statistical, but actual, without raising living standards for the local population it would be impossible to overcome the conflicting situation in the region, she said.
“Crime is a social phenomenon, which has been proved many times by both Russian legal experts and foreign scientists,” Lipina said. The conflicts in the North Caucasus are consequences of “many gaps of the past and present times,” but their reasons are “social and economic factors.”
“While organising new complexes, enterprises, clusters in the North Caucasus, it is necessary to analyse problems of previous years and avoid repeating mistakes,” the professor concluded.