This year's national celebration of World Tourism Day will be held at Nchiraa at Wenchi in the Brong Ahafo Region on September 27. The day, which will be celebrated on the theme: "Tourism Biodiversity," will be used to create awareness on the waterfall at Nchiraa to attract investment to the municipality to develop the resource in a sustainable manner. Launching the day at a press conference in Accra yesterday, the Minister of Tourism, Mrs Zita Okaikoi, said the tourism sector created about 260,000 jobs and contributed about $1.6 billion in foreign earnings. She said during the celebration, there would be activities such as tree planting, public awareness programmes on the theme for the celebration, sightseeing tours including a visit to the Nchiraa Waterfall, fun games, as well as a grand durbar of chiefs of the Brong Ahafo Region to climax the national day. She said at the regional level, major activities planned included sensitisation seminars; tree growing exercises and sight seeing, and that those pre-planned activities were intended to whip up enthusiasm in the public towards the national day celebration. Mrs Okaikoi said the theme for the celebration was a unique opportunity to raise public awareness of the importance of biodiversity to tourism and the role of sustainable tourism in the conservation of life on earth. She said biodiversity was "a key tourism asset and fundamental to its sustained growth". "For us in the tourism sector, we associate ourselves in this new vision for biodiversity, considering the fact that the issue of biodiversity loss is a phenomenon that already affects certain destinations in particular ecological and coastal destination, among others. "Statistics available indicate that 24.3 per cent or about 5,517,000 hectares of Ghana is forested. Of this, 6.4 per cent or roughly 353,000 hectares is classified as primary forest," she said, adding that "Ghana lost an average of 135,409 hectares of forest per year". Mrs Okaikoi said between 1990 and 2005, Ghana lost 25.9 per cent (1,931,000 hectares) of its forest cover, and that for the 1990-2005 intervals, Ghana lost 27.6 per cent of its forest and woodland habitat. "To me this is frightening because the forest is very crucial to our survival and there is now an urgent need for national and local governments, corporate organisations, churches, international organisations and the media to join in the crusade by developing and implementing strategies to arrest the situation," she said. Ghana today, she said, had emerged as a special African tourist destination drawing people and visitors to experience not only its fascinating cultural diversity, history and natural endowments but also to understudy or enjoy peace, stability, good governance and hospitality. Mrs Okaikoi said the celebration of the day will provide basis not only to create awareness about the importance of tourism but also help mobilise support from social partners to develop the necessary infrastructure to boost the growth of the sector for their mutual benefit. Source: Daily Graphic