KARACHI, Dec 15: The inflow of global capital into Karachi has ensured exploitation in the name of development and the recent spate in the number of luxury housing projects in the city is purely for the benefit of the rich at the cost of the poor. This was the general consensus of speakers at the inaugural session of the Eighth Akhtar Hameed Khan Development Forum held at the National Institute of Management (formerly Nipa) here on Saturday. Though economist Shahid Kardar was to deliver the keynote address on the topic of ‘Global Capital and Land’, he was unable to attend and instead Roland D’Souza, Naseer Memon and Zulfiqar Halepoto spoke.

“Why does global capital want to invest in Pakistan?” asked Mr D’Souza, who works with a local NGO, and said weak regulation in Pakistan was the reason. “Why don’t they invest in America or Japan?” he said, adding that the world as a whole was consuming far more than what it was producing, terming this overreach.

Naseer Memon, who is also associated with an NGO working for sustainable development, said the recent “deluge of dollars into Pakistan was a signal to many that something sinister was afoot in the name of development”.

Describing the waterfront projects in Karachi as ‘destruction, not development’, he said that a big part of global capital went into real estate. Human rights and ecology issues were being overlooked in the name of development, he said, adding that an impending ecological disaster was on the cards.

“Who is global capital for? A former minister has said that after the sea-front project is complete, the city will look like Dubai. So Dubai is our development model. This shows that global capital is serving the needs of the rich,” he said.

“If the land mafia are given the chance, they would even occupy the moon and Mercury,” he commented acerbically, adding that one of the reasons for the current flour crisis might be that the land meant for agriculture and the production of food crops was being gobbled up by “developers”.

He rejected the assumption that FDI – foreign direct investment –was beneficial at all and instead termed it exploitative. In 2001, $12.8 million were invested in the construction sector while in 2006 that figure jumped to $937 million.Mr Halepoto claimed that global capital enabled soft aggression, which allowed hegemony without the need to resort to violence or warfare. He regretted that all the manifestoes released recently by political parties were almost the same when it came to the issue of favouring the free market economy. Most of them ignored the issue of land reforms, and hence for voters, there was not much choice.—QAM