Bloggers' Model Forest Resort

How may we anti-poverty bloggers begin to act on our ideals instead of perpetually blaming politicians for their failure to solve mass poverty especially in the 3rd World? One way for us: go guerilla tactics. Construct model agribusiness ventures for employee masses to copy. Here’s one among others: a model ‘forest resort city’ in the Philippines.

Our forested resort city starts with a million or so bloggers contributing $5-$10 each over a few months to accumulate capital. Some of the initial contributions hires a team of Philippine expert consultants on tropical forestry, construction of a mini-dam hydropower chain, construction of commercial buildings and condominiums, ‘unspoiled beachfront forest’ landscaping, adult sports facilities, kiddie rides, tropical forest animals biology and breeding, and commercial tourism. The experts choose a project site: 900 hectares of a denuded mountain and 100 hectares of beachfront low-slope land. The sites get leased from state.

At construction stage, worker teams reforest the entire upland plot, 60% to fruit trees. Other teams construct a mini-dam and hydroelectric chain along a net of heavily reforested streams on the upland lease. More teams construct a chain of swimming pools with ‘rocky’ falls, obstacle courses and airsoft ‘battlefields’ for adults, and fun rides for kids. A landscape architect makes sure all facility exteriors look ‘forested’ or hidden by ‘flowery cliffs.’ Construction teams build several ten-storey condominiums, all with ‘flowery-cliff’ facades that make them ‘disappear’ into the forest. A threatened animal species breeding facility provides the forest with tropical birds, mammals, and ruminants for binocular viewing along streams and ponds where feeding stations attract the colorful animals. Pacific Rim condo developers become joint venture partners for each condo building. While still on construction stage, management pre-sells condo space and uses proceeds to build more condos with more joint venture partners. Buyers are local inn and hotel operators, food chains, retailers, service companies, mall operators, short-course schools, spa chains, and 1st World families that need vacation sharing condos, condo units for hire to tourists, or retirement homes. Our blogging nets invite US boating groups to set up tour boat fleets, a marina and dive training facilities at the coast. All the while we advertise our ‘forest city’ all over the internet so it gets flooded with tourists from opening time. Wealthy blogger-investors are expected to form the tourist vanguard.

Of course our resort should earn millions of tourist dollars weekly during regular operations. Leasing and sale of condo spaces provides major profit. Rental of sports facilities provide more. Our managed forest yields assorted tropical fruits, juices, fruit cocktails, ice-cream ingredients, health drinks, mushrooms, honey, orchids, ornamentals, rattan and wood furniture, terrariums for sale, and fees from guided forest tours of waterfall picnic grounds. Our resort’s uniqueness as an ‘unspoiled forest’ with all manner of city amenities hidden inside, plus sports facilities, copious ‘natural’ swimming pools, clean beaches, island-hopping boat fleets, elevated gardens between ‘flowery cliff’ condos (to hide service vehicles), are sure to become a hit among tourists tired of ‘commercial-looking’ resorts with stark buildings. A good portion of the world’s yearly tourist horde is expected to stay for weeks or months or till death in our forest resort city. Legions of entrepreneurs looking for business opportunities should flock to our resort, where an endless flow of businessmen on vacation are all potential markets for all manner of goods, services and business proposals. Consequently, resort profits are expected to rise sky-high. We reward investors with dividends at rates way above average corporate returns to encourage more investors. Profits plus new investments should build another resort city in another Philippine province.

The social leverage however is the most satisfying. Our profit-making resorts should encourage thirty million Filipino employees to form thousand-member entrepreneurial groups that copy our resort formats. Low salaries push the employee masses to pressure government into passing a law that grants loans to thousand-employee groups that set up agribusinesses, including of course forest resorts. Consequently, the country’s 18 million hectares of currently denuded uplands convert not only into forest resorts but to multi-crop farms, fruit tree forests, forested mini hydropower chains and forest ranches that supply resort cities. The resorts get low-priced foods that attract more tourists. Sweet sorghum plantations and ethanol distilleries (derived from another blogger project model) provide cheap fuel to tour boats and motor home caravans that serve the resorts. Mini-hydropower chains supply the lowest-priced electricity in the Pacific Rim. All contribute towards ultra-low tour prices that attract increasingly larger portions of the world’s 150 million-strong yearly tourist flood. A tourist spends an average $1,000 per stay of several days, so wealth from tourism inundates employee masses who own the agribusinesses. Since a good law is forever, the ‘loans for mass entrepreneurship’ law keeps creating thousands of agribusinesses and related companies year after year, for all eternity. As the profit motive creates copycats of the Philippine model all over the 3rd World’s coastal tropics, billions of jobs get created for bottom poor. Fortunes in stock shares and dividends flood tropical economies’ employee masses. The bonus is just as planet-scale: new tropics-wide forests absorbing millions of tons of greenhouse gases every second, thereby putting a brake on global warming. Our vanguard blogger army becomes a planet-scale redeemer.