Economic Benefits of Agricultural Tourism: Appraisal and Prospects

According to Bowen (1989), when tourism becomes established in an agrarian economy, the common perception is that tourism will drive out agriculture, but with the emergence of corporate farming and smart farmers, there is a need to integrate the fate of growth of the agricultural sector with the industry and service sectors. Hence emerged a concept known as 'Agricultural Tourism' that integrates tourism with agriculture. Since the tourism sector has no boundaries, the integration of agriculture with tourism can be expanded in multiple ways. The inter linkage between agriculture and tourism may act as a catalyst in generating new economic opportunities, revenue generation, and in turn, contribute to the GDP growth of the economy. In the present paper, an effort has been made to assess empirically how the growth in agriculture and tourism can contribute to the overall growth of the economy. Multiple linear regression method was applied to assess the impact of agriculture and tourism on GDP growth.