The Prime Minister has announced the projects which are meant to kick-start our economy – the ones that are going to rev up revenue-generation and create more jobs. These will consist in the building of a cruise liner terminal in Gozo, casino licences in Gozo and… land reclamation.
Labour has always had a bee in its bonnet about land reclamation
Now Labour has always had a bee in its bonnet about land reclamation. Just like its unwavering belief that Malta is lying over giant oil reserves, there’s this unshaken conviction that land reclamation could be the Next Big Thing. You know – in the same way that the PN swung from setting up Malta as a financial services centre to a golfing destination to construction capital to IT hub (remember the Smart Island pipe dream?) to online gaming mecca, Labour has this land reclamation fixation.
Last summer, Joseph Muscat returned from a trip to Dubai extolling the plus sides of land reclamation. He said it was doable, that it would ease the pressure off Outside Development Zones, and that the Malta Environment and Planning Authority was keeping its studies about land reclamation under wraps.
It all sounds so deceptively simple and attractive. We live in a small, crowded country with barely enough room to swing a cat, we’ve got thousands of tonnes of construction waste lying around. Why not kill two birds with one stone and gain valuable space by dumping our debris in the sea and creating magnificent debris islands?
From the developers’ point of view it’s a win-win situation. They get paid for the inert waste they’ve produced over the years and get to benefit from the investment in the project they seem to think will attract scores of billionaires to our reclaimed shores.
I bet that visions of Dubai’s Palm Island and The World are dancing before their eyes. Dubai’s land reclamation projects are touted as being among the most successful ventures in this field. And those who are impressed by the ostentatious and the extravagant, will be awed by the engineering marvel that is Palm Island and by the grandiosity of The World – a group of islands in the shape of the world’s land masses. And now Muscat seems to be urging us to think big and to emulate the sea-conquering projects of others.
I get the feeling that people who are sceptical about the necessity of embarking on such a project, or who are concerned about its environmental consequences or its profitability, will be dismissed as wet blankets. They will be told they don’t have the soaring vision to realise that such projects will put Malta on the map – that land reclamation has been done before – in Malta and elsewhere.
And inevitably, anyone who isn’t a land reclamation convert will be passed off as an environmental weirdo with a fetish for protecting sea weed and sea urchins instead of admiring the foresight and the ambition of those enthused about the project.
Except that the idea behind this building-on-water thing isn’t anything new. It’s just another form of artificial stimulus to prop up the ailing Maltese construction industry.
For some reason or other, our politicians think the construction industry is some sort of special needs industry that does not answer to the laws of supply and demand, and that should be helped out at all costs. So, if there aren’t any big building projects going on, we have to create them even if there is no need for them.
And the truth of the matter is that we have absolutely no need for more land if it’s to be used for housing purposes. At the last count there are over 70,000 vacant properties in Malta. I find it hard to believe they’re all uninhabitable. There seems to be no dearth of high-end luxury properties on the market either, judging by the adverts for them.
Why then are we thinking of going down this route – with the attendant risks of polluting the seabeds – if we don’t have any pressing need for real estate? Simply to tide over the building industry temporarily? What happens when our debris islands are built and inaugurated and the anticipated investment doesn’t materialise, because there was no demand for it, or when the real estate bubble bursts?
If we’re basing ourselves on the Dubai model, we would do well to forget the glitzy luxury hotels and multimillion malls and look at what happened when the financial crisis hit in 2008. The dizzying expansion of Dubai had been based on borrowed cash and speculative investment in the real estate market. When the bottom fell out of that, so did Dubai’s economy. Who says it can’t happen here?
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt