<B>By Deepa BHOOKHUN</B>

It really is quite extraordinary; as the international situation threatens to get worse ? climate change, food security problems, price of petrol and recession among others ? Mauritius rides on a bumper crop wave. Aren?t we lucky? We really have been blessed by the gods, haven?t we?

This would have been splendid, had it been true. Unfortunately maybe it?s about time we grew up and stopped believing in fairy tales. Understand by fairy tales, the tales that politicians like to tell us. But it?s so much nicer to believe in nice things, isn?t it? After all, who likes bad news? We are so desperate for good news that, since the PRB report and the budget speech, the feel-good factor in the country is almost tangible. When you sit in Parliament and look closely at members of government up to and including the Prime minister, you can easily tell that they are happy and grateful for the respite. I?m happy for them ? I do like them, I must say.

So wearing a big smile on their faces, the Prime minister and his minister of Finance charmingly -? and convincingly -? deliver their message: things are well and the reforms have borne fruits and the cake has grown bigger; so we can now all have a bigger size of it. And they are not lying either. The Prime minister is right when he says that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) for this year alone is more than the FDI of the last twenty years put together. Yes, this is great news indeed.

But aren?t you curious as to where that money came from? I was. And I found out. Most of it comes from ?hotels and Integrated Resorts Schemes (IRS)?. There hasn?t been much investment in hotels this year so I?m assuming that the economy is doing well mainly because we are selling our land to foreigners.

Who cares, would you say, as long as the money is coming in? I do. Forget about the part ? highly objectionable in my view ? where government is in actual fact selling off our lands to foreigners. After all, they could argue that the land was never ours in the first place. That?s besides the point but hey.

No, what bothers me is what are we going to do once we?ve sold all the land? Regardless of what the Finance minister might say, selling IRS villas is a one-off transaction. Is the number of jobs that the IRS will create sufficient to justify this selling off of prime land? Will the owners of IRS villas spend enough time in the country for this to generate economic activity? Or is it a case of us giving those people the right to vote ? together with a piece of our country ? in exchange for a sum of money that is not as high as it could have been?

But IRS villas are not our only problem. And all our problems have one thing in common ? we are shying away from them.