Tourism-Led Inclusive Growth Paradigm: Opportunities and Challenges in the Agricultural Food Supply Chain in Livingstone, Zambia

In the Global South, tourism is credited for employment and income generation, infrastructure development and poverty reduction. However, opportunities to maximise the impact of tourism through backward linkages, such as linking tourist consumption to local food production, have not been widely exploited. Many scholars advance the view that most national governments in sub-Saharan Africa tend to maximise tourism impacts by promoting initiatives to grow tourism demand increase tourist length of stay, and tourist expenditure with very minimal attention to inter-sectoral linkages. This paper highlights facilitators and barriers to sustainable market linkages between tourism and agriculture in Livingstone, Zambia, within the pro-poor tourism theoretical framework. The study utilises interviews with the accommodation sector and questionnaires with local farmers, raising the question of opportunities and limitations they experience as suppliers in the tourism supply chain and how this facilitates inclusion or exclusion in tourism-led growth.