Which agritourism for which suburban countryside? A heuristic and comparative analysis in Wallonia and Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg (part 2)

Mutations, transformations, transitions are keywords which open the door to many questions regarding the global European agriculture. The resources of the rural countryside in Europe are subject to many pressures. Agricultural activities are decreasing and farmers are losing importance. In some northwestern European countryside, the declining agriculture compels to diversify activities in farms. Some farmers need to rethink their business goals in order to successfully sustain their operations in the economic space. In many areas, one of the solutions suggested is the development of agritourism. Agritourism in Wallonia and in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg is a tourist activity proposed by the farmer in his farm. While addressing the challenges and countering threats of their agriculture, both suburban areas present many advantages and opportunities for tourism development. Different tourist and leisure developments are conceived and proposed. The activity is reinforced by popular images of sustainability and ecology. Is agritourism a universal solution or is it a reflected contextualized solution? In the Tel-Aviv CSRS meeting, in 2010, we presented a communication on this issue. While the theoretical review and the aim of the first paper were well presented, the empirical results were not well documented because we were at the beginning of the PhD research. Today, we propose, in this paper, to improve information and to answer to the different comments from the members of the commission. Agritourism should be defined, localized, differentiated. Between 2010 and 2014, we conducted interviews of Walloon and Luxembourg tenants (n = 33), surveys among potential tourists (n = 1148) in seven tourist places, interviews of privileged witnesses (n = 31), and field observations. Working on two regions of Western Europe which had not been analyzed previously, the Walloon and Luxembourg suburban countryside, we want to understand the agritourism dynamics, the factors that influence the location and development, and the images of farm tourism. The purpose of this research is to understand the geographical relationship between agritourism, countryside, local resources, agriculture, and tourism specialization. This issue is underdeveloped in the literature and our PhD thesis contributes to fill this gap. We scrutinize the spatial distribution of agritourism in both regions, the logic of emergence of tourism in a farm, the links between these tourist functions and these agricultural functions. We analysed the tenants and visitors’ reasons and motivations in regards of the regional and local context. Finally, we build a typology of the countryside according to agritourism. We conclude that the farm diversification should pay attention to several local and regional factors to succeed in a win-win combination of tourism and agriculture. These factors are listed in a heuristic model, which is a user-friendly tool to think future development of agritourism in the European countryside.