It was recently reported that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) for the first six months of 2013 amounted to Rs 4.7 billion. All in all, not a bad day at the office. Take a peek at a breakdown of this figure and the picture looks distinctly less rosy though. Indeed, most of the cash, to the tune of Rs2.9 billion, coming from abroad was “invested” in real estate. More to the point, Integrated Resort Schemes (IRS) and Residential Estate Schemes (RES) accounted for nearly 47% of FDI. Take away the fancy acronyms and what are you left with? Land. That’s right, the main source of investment from abroad is the selling of our limited land resources to fortunate foreigners. How much do you reckon our famed Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector has attracted since the beginning of the year? Not even Rs 20 million.

So, on the evidence of the FDI figures, our greatest asset clearly isn’t our people. It’s our land. And we’re hawking it off like we have oodles of the stuff. This trend is unlikely to abate anytime soon, given that the minister of Finance has announced that the 2013 budget will prioritize construction and tourism. Really? How many more IRS, hotels, shopping centres and roads can we build? To add insult to injury, the minister seems unaware that the two sectors he’s plumping for are increasingly at sixes and sevens. For the more we smother everything in concrete, the less attractive we’re making the country for tourists who have to travel thousands of kilometres to come here. But let’s put that inconsistency aside for now.

For there’s a structural phenomenon emerging. In the construction industry we have what can safely be described as an insatiable beast. Indeed, during the heady pre-crisis days everyone wanted in on the action. The country was in effect in the grip of a building binge. Consequently, the sector expanded massively, to the extent that it’s come to play an increasingly important role in the economy, both in terms of GDP and employment. This means that even though the gold rush is mostly over, the beast has to be sustained. In effect, the industry has become too big to fail. So we have to keep feeding it new projects, irrespective of their implications on other sectors and our water, energy and land resources. It’s the very definition of a “fuite en avant”.

The fact of the matter is it can’t go on forever for the simple reason that sooner or later we’re going to end up running out of land. What will happen between now and then is anyone’s guess, but one would at least like to see our decision- makers preparing the inevitable transition. More than a decade after the launch of the cyber-island, it attracted in the first half of 2013 only slightly more investment than what government spent last year on the “setting up of Syndic for housing estates”. But don’t expect any answers any time soon. A day good at the office has apparently become an end in itself.