Some of us were recently discussing Dubai's exponential growth as of late, and NPR's Marketplace program is on location at the Emirate this week for a series of special reports. In the "sustainability" email thread a while back, I mentioned that if all humans consumed like Americans did, we would need 6 Earths worth of resources to support us. There are only 2 nations who consume more wastefully and have a bigger ecological footprint than Yanks per capita - can you guess who? Yep, the Emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are living even larger! If you thought Las Vegas couldn't sustain its booming growth in the resource-poor Nevada desert, Dubai is even worse, with it's artificial island oases and towering skyscrapers (soon it will be home to the world's tallest) pitted against 35C summers, meager potable water supply, and brutal Gulf sandstorms.
And Dubai is not just environmentally unsustainable, but the country's population is 85% foreign, as wealthy Emirati are dependent on a constant flow of skilled professionals and physical laborers from abroad (whom they often treat like animals). Yet half of the native residents are unemployed, and enjoy a $5,000/month stipend and free housing from the government (I guess $100/barrel oil sales do trickle down to help poor people somewhere!). Also the local traditions and culture are getting watered-down and displaced by commerce/modernity, as you would expect. English is the de facto official language. Some people equate Dubai to an airport, where foreigners come and go for their brief business and don't really take away anything uniquely Arab from the experience (like can we really get a sense of Japanese culture just by walking through Narita Airport for a day?).
But Dubai's lavish and ostentatious displays of wealth, which are meant to attract the high-rolling businessmen and tourists of the world, are also sparking the ire of more conservative Muslim neighbors. Their Babel-like arrogant ambition is quite annoying and bordering on the ludicrous, with an exclusive island mansion development shaped like the world map ( http://www.palmsales.ca/new_properties/theworld/video.htm), a planned Six Flags theme park twice the size of Disney World Orlando (http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-trw-sixflags5mar05), an indoor ski resort (http://www.skidxb.com/English/facts_eng.htm?mid=1&sid=2), and even hopes to host the 2016 Olympic games (as if). All this on real estate smaller than Connecticut. It's definitely amazing, arguably commendable, and possibly insane.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/episodes/show_rundown.php?show_id=14
KAI RYSSDAL: It's funny how you can go halfway around the world and still feel like you've never left home. Of course you've got your Starbucks here and McDonald's. Kentucky Fried Chicken's very big, too, but fast food's small fry compared to what's on the way. Just this past week, Six Flags announced it'll be building a 5 million square foot amusement park here. Busch Gardens and Sea World are coming, too. If all that reminds you of a certain American city also built in the desert, well join the club, says commentator and Arab media producer Jamal Dajani.
JAMAL DAJANI: When I first saw Dubai from a distance, it reminded me of Las Vegas. Just like Vegas' shimmering chrome skyscrapers, everything in Dubai is so immense and so grand. Instead of casinos, there are burjs, or towers. Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world, is still under construction. Then you have Al Burj, Burj Al Arab and so on, and just like Vegas, people go to Dubai in search of financial gain. Arab men in their gleaming white dish-dashes, Europeans in business suits, Indians in traditional clothing and women with their Gucci bags. They're all after one thing -- money. A Saudi friend of mine complained. "I went to the bank and could not find any tellers who spoke Arabic," a familiar complaint in the States, from those who insist everyone should speak English.
Not everyone is happy with this new Babylon. More than half a million Saudis a year visit Dubai. They've invested billions of dollars in this tiny emirate, but resentment is brewing amongst the Salafi Muslims in the Kingdom next door. Many Saudis believe that Dubai is a bad influence on their conservative society. A society where women cannot even drive stands in stark contrast to Dubai, where women in bikinis sun on the shores of manmade islands. Dubai has provided jobs and has brought in modernity into a desolate dessert, but it remains a playground for the "haves," particularly those who "have" oil.
Many wonder what impact this wealthy emirate will have. Will proceeds from skyrocketing oil prices filter to poor countries, or will it only benefit the few? Most Arabs realize that their petro-bonanza will one day come to an end. Their future may lie in tourism, leisure, media and banking, industries that keep Dubai light-years ahead of the competition, and an envy to its neighbors.
KAI RYSSDAL: Jamal Dajani is the co-host of Arab Talk on KPOO radio in San Francisco and the Director of Middle Eastern Programming at Link TV.
Yes you are right - and they're probably the #1 financial center in between Germany and India already. But I think they will have trouble getting non-Arab/Muslim people to relocate there, even with a gimmicky exclusive island community. The doc I saw on Nat Geo said that the private mansions weren't selling very well so far, so they decided to turn more of the real estate into vacation resorts - for foreigners wanting a short-term fling, not an investment property or residence in 130 degrees summers and 300 miles from active war zones. I guess many high-powered Westerners might be in town for 1-4 weeks to close a deal, and might want cooler lodgings than the Four Seasons downtown? What I thought was funny was the floor plans of those homes also had a garage. You're on a tiny 300-yard-long ISLAND! Are there even roads? Will the ferry come to their front door to pick up their Bentley and transport it to the mainland? They should have massive car parks at the port instead!-----------
Dubai's objective isn't primarily tourism, it's finance. They're currently a regional financial hub, but their objective is to become a primary center of world finance like London or New York. There is massive growth in sovereign wealth funds, some large portion of it from the Middle East, which Dubai is naturally positioned to become a leader in.
Similarly there's a growing market for financial products which conform to sharia law - just as Christian and Jewish cultures have rules about usury and other financial appropriate/legal modes of behavior in financial relationships, so too does Islamic law, and those rules differ from those of Christianity or Islam. As more Muslims look to invest their money, there will be a huge opportunity for the firms which can create financial products catering to those investors. Those products need to be conformant with sharia law and also deliver good returns. Dubai's objective is to become a center of expertise in this area. Then they will look to leverage the growth in both of those areas over the next 10-15 years to drive huge amounts of capital to and through their city, in hopes of becoming one of those centers of world finance.
The ostentatious displays of wealth are a way of catering to the finance folks, of demonstrating to them that Dubai is a comfortable and civilized place to live and work. If they can lure a large number of those 6-, 7- and 8-figure a year jobs to their city, it provides a pretty strong economic base.--------------Yeah definitely, they are showing more forward thinking than say Saudi Arabia or Nigeria. Their oil is projected to run out by 2016. Dubai is already a finance and trading hub in the Mideast, but by flaunting such ridiculous wealth - they are becoming like Switzerland or Singapore (only way worse). Tiny rich nations too big for their britches and causing resentment among neighbors. Like nothing is wrong with growing your tourism industry and developing unique attractions, but the insane exclusivity and flamboyance open them up to attack from haters like me! Also I just don't think that it's a good economic model to depend on filthy rich Eurotrash tourists living it up, and real estate investors who will blow $20M on a private island escape. One hostage crisis or war up north in Iran, and the tourism will dry up like Israel or Bali.--------------I know we are ripping on Dubai for good times, but it is my understanding that they are doing this to sway the Euro elite and corporate fat cats from all over the world to take up residence there. That way they are no longer dependant on oil. The middle east is as stuck as we are when it comes to oil, the difference is that while the supplies last they are on top. But if a new technology comes out, or we manage to wean ourselves off a significant portion of what we consume, they are SOL. Their countries are pretty jacked up WITH all that oil cash.
But they must be idiots if they are trying to get Euro trash to live there. They better start training their people to make techno!
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Haha more craziness from Dubai:
http://www.palmsales.ca/new_properties/theworld/video.htm
No need to travel anywhere - you can see the entire world on man-made islands off the coast of the UAE! Except now when you visit Europe or Japan, it's 130 degrees! At least the Arab Tower "sail" hotel was original (though designed by Brits, not Arabs) - I hate it when these filthy rich morons just copycat like Vegas does. I love at the end of the video when the narrator tries to assure guests of security with constant water patrols. I actually hope Al Qaeda bombs the place as an affront to Islam! Or at least climate change will submerge that $10B worth of real estate in a few decades anyway!
Another Dubai monstrosity, and they plan to copy the Atlantis casino resort from Nassau: http://www.palmsales.ca/palm/palmvideo.htm. No gambling though - too un-Islamic!-----------
This is Dubai's attempt at becoming 24th Century. And I thought Starfleet Command was in SF!
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/extreme_machines/4249163.html------------
Building fast on cheap labor
Dubai's workforce is almost entirely made up of laborers from other countries. They're nothing less than crucial to the city. Stephen Beard reports on the supply of cheap labor that makes Dubai go.Guide: Here, we have here, on your right hand it's Spanish design. For a four bedrooms it's ten million.
Or $3 million U.S. The property here sells at hefty western prices but for many of the migrant labourers who built it the pay and conditions are Third World.
Sonapour -- a vast, dusty labour camp on the outskirts of Dubai. Sonapour means City of Gold. But here there are just acres of shabby single story concrete blocks. They house an astonishing number of people. At least 250,000 migrant workers. A large chunk of the country's total population of two million. Mohammed is a local photographer who always finds this place a shock when he comes here.
Mohammed: It's only about four or five miles from the commercial district of Dubai and, you know, even though it's that close, two worlds apart completely. You have majority of people here earning less than $200 a month.
The workers are required to live in camps like this. I've come here to talk to some of them with Mohammed who speaks Hindi. We've walked into one compound housing 5,000 labourers. We slipped through the gate, past the security check point which was unmanned and into one of the hundreds of small rooms. But the labourers told Mohammed their biggest problem is money. They earn less than $40 for a basic 72 hour week. That's 12 hours a day for six days.
Mohammed: They feel they are being treated the same way as animals are being treated. He says life is very, very hard here.
Their life has become harder because Dubai's currency, the dirham, is pegged to the dollar. The slump in the U.S. currency has dragged down the value of their wages. They send less money home to support their families, the main reason for coming to Dubai. Many feel trapped here.
Mohammed: He says he has taken a loan to come here. So, how will he go back without paying the loan? There will be a problem.
Some of the workers are better off than others. Some of the European contractors pay more and provide better facilities than some of the Middle Eastern companies. The Government of Dubai is trying to improve matters overall. It's drafting a modern labour law laying down minimum standards of working and living conditions. It's even mulling over a minimum wage. But Chris Davidson who lived for several years in this city and has written two books about it says the sharp contrast between rich and poor is inevitable.
Chris Davidson: Dubai, trying to become this global city, has essentially brought two sides together. It's created an incredibly stark fault line between First World and Third World.
But the faultline is moving. As the Indian economy booms more Indian workers are finding jobs at home. And word has spread about some of the problems in Dubai.It's becoming much tougher for this city to recruit labour in South Asia. It's having to look further and further afield to China, to Vietnam and to the Philippines.
What to do about labor imbalance?
While Dubai is booming, the Gulf region's overall unemployment is near 15%. Kai Ryssdal spoke with labor consultant Kito de Boer about what leaders can do to address disparities between the local population and visiting workers.KAI RYSSDAL: Dubai imports its construction workers. Its bankers, too, to work in the private sector. The locals do government work. Problem is those government jobs aren't so plentiful anymore. So most Emiratis don't work at all. Across the broader gulf region, it's a similar story. Unemployment is near 15 percent. Way worse if you only count people under 30. As the economy of this region keeps growing, and it will, disparities between the native population and those who are just visiting could become a problem. I sat down last week with labor consultant Kito de Boer and I asked him what the leadership in the Gulf ought to do about that.
KITO DE BOER: The first is it has to get its education system right. The current education system is failing by any objective measure. The second thing that they need to do is to get the labor and immigration rules coherent and consistent with giving their citizens priority when it comes to employment. And only bringing in those people who have a distinctive contribution to make to economic development.
DE BOER: The gulf countries are unique. They have a flexible immigration policy where it's pretty easy to get in, though it's getting more difficult. But they have very rigid labor markets, which means that once you're in on a specific job, it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to change jobs. You get locked in.
RYSSDAL: Let me get back to education for a second. What is it about the education system here that is failing the population?
DE BOER: The way that people get taught in the gulf is they get taught by rote. They get reinforced to recite what they were told. A very traditional form of learning. I think many societies go through that stage, but it does not advance critical thinking. Many people would also...many employers would also say that a number of basic skills are underdeveloped, which makes people hard to be employed. But there is not a mechanism that has yet been developed in many of these countries to actually reconcile and come to a national agreement about what it is we actually want schools to teach.
DE BOER: When you speak to the rulers in the region, the one thing that they will have clear agreement around is that they see the number one priority for their countries moving forward to be education. By 2020 the GDP per head, the amount of wealth per head, per person in this region, will be where Germany and Japan, amongst the wealthiest countries in the world, are today. The real risk is that if you have an economy with a wealth per head of Germany or Japan, but an educational system where the educational attainments are on the level of Ghana, then you have a major societal problem. Because the majority of their people in their society will not be able to gain effectively through their own labor the benefits of what's happening to their economy. They have to find a way of getting their own societies to be the primary beneficiaries of that.
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