If you are a reasonably well-traveled golfer and have never, ever questioned the wisdom of certain of golf developments you\u2019ve visited, well, time to check the old pulse. Even for those of us accustomed to think that at the very least a golf course is almost always a buffer against more insidious forms of development, there\u2019s something worrisome about playing through clusters of houses without seeing a single kid on a swing, a guy mowing his lawn.<\/p>\n
This was a fairly common scene well before the real estate crisis in the States and, no doubt, one of the reasons for it. For Americans, though, the golf course land-use debate has largely been tabled, as very few new golf courses are being built.<\/p>\n
By contrast and consensus, the new locus of golf growth is Asia. And I mention the US experience with overbuilding to reinforce the notion that I\u2019m not reflexively pro-development. However, my recent involvement in a media-fueled controversy over the construction of golf courses in Vietnam included a fascinating, distinctly local twist on the whole question of overall land use.<\/p>\n
(Full disclosure: I work for Mandarin Media, which represents the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail, and I wrote the initial draft of the following response to below-referenced piece in the International Herald Tribune<\/em>.)<\/p>\n The experience also confounded my preconceived (if self-serving) notion that journalists are inherently more likely than, say, developers to employ an even-handed recitation of the facts. Reprinted below is a hyperlink to the original International Herald Tribune<\/em> feature, which also appeared in The New York Times<\/em>, and the response to it.<\/p>\n OFF COURSE<\/strong><\/p>\n Did the <\/em>International Herald Tribune get its HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (Oct. 21, 2009) \u2014 For a sport notable more for emotional restraint than for hysterics, it can seem ironic that golf, and golf-course development, can generate extremes like Tuesday\u2019s feature in The International Herald Tribune<\/em><\/a> titled \u201cGolf Courses Now Grow in Vietnam\u2019s Rice Fields.\u201d Certainly the reporter, Seth Mydans, leaves no doubt that he views the building and operation of golf courses in Vietnam as an unequivocal evil.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s instructive to recall that only last month The New York Times<\/em>, the Tribune<\/em>\u2019s parent company, featured essentially the opposite viewpoint as its online \u201cIdea of the Day.\u201d That idea, first published in Newsweek<\/em><\/a>, came from Richard N. Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, and lauded Vietnam\u2019s initiative as a golf destination as equally unequivocal proof of political and economic progress and stability. A similarly positive accounting of Vietnam as a golf destination had appeared in the Times<\/em> travel section the previous year.<\/p>\n In such an emotionally charged, all-or-nothing atmosphere, opinions tend to be rigid, \u201cfacts\u201d subject to manipulation or outright fabrication. Some instances conspicuous in Tuesday\u2019s piece include, briefly, the following:<\/p>\n \u2022 Land use. Indisputably an important issue, the article cites the loss of a million acres of land devoted to rice cultivation between 2000 and 2006. But during this period, only two golf courses were built, thus accounting for roughly .03 percent of the lost acreage. In any event, virtually none of the acreage occupies arable land.<\/p>\n \u201cOur golf courses were not built on converted agricultural lands,\u201d notes Baron Ah Moo, CEO of Indochina Land\u2019s Hotels & Resorts division, \u201cbut rather land slated for other, higher density projects abandoned or sold to us directly from the provincial government, whose infrastructure requirement specifically included a golf course.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nstory straight about golf in Vietnam?<\/em><\/p>\n