Absolute beachfront villas or eco-friendly hotels are the omnipresent words when getting around Bali. Real estate development on the island is moving at a high pace, impossible to overlook and equally impossible to quantify. It is not easy to get a clear picture of what is currently being built on the island of the gods. There is no central source of information that can clear up the picture of what Bali has to prepare for in 2009 and the coming years, not even official government sources. Nobody knows what anyone else is doing, and many developments are taking place in semi-secrecy.

“Our governmental system makes it impossible to collect data on the development, because the regencies are ruled autonomously,” says I Gde Nurjaya, head of the Bali Tourism Agency. Because development activities are not coordinated, the question rises if Bali will be able to handle the additional streams of people and buildings. Research by The Jakarta Post shows more than 15,000 new hotel rooms and at least 300 new Bali villas in remote and urban areas will pop up all over Bali within the next two years. The real number of developments in Bali is vast and impossible to count.

Bali is still being promoted as Paradise Island, but can it keep up with the increasing number of tourists who are going to flood the paradise? “The decentralization of Bali’s nine regencies has lead to greedy, careless behavior, such as violating laws that have been created to protect the environment,” says Agung Wardana, executive director of the Indonesian Forum for Environment (WALHI).

Each year, the NGO tracks up to six cases of legal or environmental violations. At present, the development of Lake Buyan in Buleleng regency is in their crosshairs. “The lakes are part of a protected area and regarded as sacred, so the authorities should slowly stop selling every piece of the island,” Wardana says. He also complains that the “eco” label is being abused rather than put to good use to seriously develop environmentally friendly facilities.

The investors come from every corner of the globe, which doesn’t make it easier to draw a clear picture of the development landscape. Many are Australian and Indonesian, but developers from Korea, Japan, the US, China, Italy, France, the UK, Germany, Singapore, Thailand, Russia and Canada are also building here. “I currently don’t see a balance between the unlimited tourism development and investments in other important sectors such as agriculture and industrial products,” says Dr. Nyoman Erawan, professor of economics at Udayana University. “I’m not surprised, though, because the regents can collect 10 percent of taxes from hotels and restaurants, which makes it attractive for them to look for investors.”

News by The Jakarta Post