In addition to bombing ISIS as it marches across the Mideast, the Obama administration has devised a new, supplemental plan to address the negative impact the radical Muslim terror army and other destabilizing forces are having on the region: Dump millions more in U.S. taxpayer dollars into promoting tourism there.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, continues to focus on bolstering the lagging hospitality industry in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where the agency granted contracting giant Chemonics International yet another award to boost the viability of that business sector.
The latest project will focus on creating a new Bakery and Pastry Skills program at a Vocational Training Center in the city of Irbid.
The U.S. under both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations has launched programs over the past decade-plus in an attempt to increase tourism-related employment in Jordan.
The U.S. from 1951 through 2013 provided Jordan with economic and military aid totaling $13.83 billion, according to a Congressional Research Service report released last month and made available by the Federation of American Scientists.
Under Obama the U.S. has provided about $660 million in annual foreign assistance to Jordan; and in the year ahead, the U.S. and Jordanian governments “may try to reach a new five-year aid deal.”
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The U.S. continues to assist Jordan as it views the nation as a moderate force in the Middle East.
“Despite conflict on its borders, [Jordan] appears to remain a relatively stable and reliable partner for the United States in the Arab world,” the CRS report says.
“Jordan’s strategic importance to the United States may be increasing given its ongoing participation in Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State,” also known as ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Both the Bush and Obama administrations undertook tourism job-creation efforts despite the general Jordanian view that such employment is demeaning and beneath their stature, the latest contracting document suggests.
USAID credits itself for gradually reversing that cultural distinction.
“While jobs in the tourism sector have been traditionally taboo for Jordanians, more and more are realizing that there are a wide variety of employment opportunities,” according to contracting documents WND discovered via routine database research.
Jordanian youth now “are finding employment in that sector in record numbers.”
USAID likewise claims that 50,000 Jordanians are now directly employed in that nation’s hospitality industry, and expects that number to increase by 25,000 “in the coming few years.”
Despite the agency’s touting of these numbers, it acknowledged it faces massive obstacles in keeping the momentum going.
“Unfortunately, tourism in Jordan has been subject to a number of shocks recently,” it said.
Visitation rates had rebounded after the so-called Arab Spring, particularly among Europeans. Likewise, the rates rose again after initially plummeting in response to the conflict in Syria.
“With the advent of renewed conflict in Gaza and the incursion of [ISIS] along Jordan’s borders, 50 percent of bookings of tour groups cancelled in the last several months as were 86 percent of car rental reservations,” the agency said in its Justification and Approval for Other Than Full & Open Competition, or JOFOC.
USAID issued the JOFOC document to explain that it needed to offer a $4.1 million “bridge award” to Chemonics rather than open a new program to competition. The action will allow the contractor to continue providing “technical support” to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, or MOTA, as well as the Jordan Tourism Board, or JTB.
Chemonics completed the Economic Growth Through Sustainable Tourism Project, or EGST, in December 2014. The total cost is unknown, as USAID without explanation redacted it amount from the document.
The contractor was not slated to launch a similarly named new endeavor – the Building Economic Sustainability Tourism Project, or BEST – until October 2015.
“Without a bridge project, the resulting programming gap in this area would severely compromise USAID’s ability to achieve [U.S. government] foreign policy goals of promoting economic stability and economic growth in Jordan,” it said.
Despite USAID’s blacking out of the prior program cost, WND located other documents that shed some light on other U.S.-funded, tourism-specific programs for Jordan.
According to another contracting document found in the FedBizOpps database, the USAID Jordan Tourism Development II, or JTD II, project was scheduled to end September 2013. Though the document does not disclose JTD II’s cost, it did note that the agency planned to award a $9.6 million follow-on contract so that Chemonics could then launch JTD III.
USAID also in 2013 released a report, “Assessment of the Jordan Tourism Sector Challenges Today, Opportunities Tomorrow,” for which the agency paid the CARANA Corp. an undisclosed amount to create.
The document reveals that U.S. taxpayers shelled out $31.5 million over five years to carry out JTD II.
It also identifies the Nature Driven Rural Development in Southern Jordan Project, a five-year, $8.26 million USAID “‘Eco-Tourism” initiative, and the five-year, $2 million Partnership for Environmental and Cultural Tourism project, which both ended in September 2013.
The agency in 2012 likewise spent $2.3 million to build a Jordanian Eco Tourism and Rangers Training Academy.
The report points out USAID has been providing “technical assistance and grant funding” to the Jordanian entities JTB and MOTA since 2002.
