Many years ago, the Trade Fair Corporation – or its predecessor by some other name – leased the greater part of the gardens of Palazzo Parisio in Naxxar, and began to hold what was supposed to be an “international” trade fair. In the process, the gardens, with their paths and pergolas, were destroyed, but that’s another matter.

The original purpose of the international trade fair was not what it is today. When I was a child, there were pavilions set up by many countries, each one stuffed with stalls and with exhibitions set up by the Malta distributors of products made in those countries. The fair was a fun outing for families from all walks of life – but in those days, there was nothing much else to do, and people had no money to spend on family outings, so anything that came almost free automatically became “somewhere to go”.

Before long, the international trade fair, designed as an exhibition targeted at the trade, rather than at retail customers, had degenerated into a large suq (market). Exhibition space devolved into stalls from which goods were sold. Salespeople demonstrated the particular advantages of washing-machine X over washing-machine Y, or haggled over the price of a food-mixer. Hordes of newly-married couples and parents with prams and pushchairs trailed from stand to stand, trying to find the best price for a carpet or for the set of children’s bedroom furniture that has come to be called, in Maltese English, a “spare bedroom” (sperbedrum).

For the last two or three decades, the International Trade Fair of Malta, as it is pompously called, has been nothing but a giant retail market, one step up from the Valletta monti.

Every year, those who rent stalls and stands complain that the takings are lower than the previous year. They attribute this to a sluggish economy, or to people hanging on to their money rather than spending it. Yet the real cause is all those changes that have taken place in Malta: the dramatic overhaul of the way we live and of our attitudes towards spending on consumer goods.

In the early 1970s, families with cars were in the minority, as were women with a driving licence – and even if they had a licence, their husbands usually took the car to work, leaving them stranded or having to take the bus. Advertising was primitive, and advertising media consisted of cable radio, TVM, The Times and The Sunday Times, the political party and union newspapers, and the Pearl & Dean advertisements that used to come on before feature films in cinemas, which few people saw in any case.

So, we had a situation in which potential customers could not get around the different shops and showrooms to find out what was available and how much it cost and, on the other hand, suppliers had limited means of reaching their potential and existing customers to let them know what was available. It was in this atmosphere that the trade fair, held once a year in July, prospered. Quite simply, it filled a giant gap in the market by bringing together those who wanted to buy with those who wanted to sell, in an event that served exactly the same purpose, and operated in a remarkably similar way, to the market fairs that took place all over Europe for centuries.

We don’t live like that anymore. Now, most families have more than one car. Women drive as a matter of course, and they have their own pay packets or at least more control over how the income brought in by their husband is spent. We don’t need to wait until July for the opportunity to see all suppliers gathered together in one space. We are bombarded by advertising. We know exactly who sells kitchens, bathrooms, lighting, washing-machines and food-mixers. We can pick up the telephone and ask for prices. We can log onto websites and find out more. And, best of all, we can drive around and look at things in the peace and quiet of a shop or showroom, rather than on a stand with a jumbled display, in the midst of the dust and chaos at the trade fair, in the hottest month of the year.

Trade fair attendances are sliding. As entertainment, the trade fair has a hell of a lot of competition. As a display of goods, it just doesn’t cut it anymore, not only because we can drive around the shops for the other 11-and-a-half months of the year, but also because lots of money is now being invested in showrooms and we would rather go there than to a shoddy temporary stand. As for trade fair discounts: those were the days. Stiff competition means that there is price-cutting throughout the year, and deals can always be made. The Malta market is flooded with goods from all over the world. That is another way in which life here has changed dramatically. We no longer have to make do with the few goods that managed to circumvent the obstacle course into the country.

So all of this begs the question: do we still need the trade fair, or has it outlived its purpose? I would say that when the lease expires, it’s time to wave this national institution a fond farewell and to move with the times. Even if the trade fair still has a few years of life left in it, this is not enough to warrant the huge investment that will be needed to set up another site at Ta’ Qali, though there may be some vested interests involved that are driving the new plans forward. These plans include a conference centre, and that too is rather strange. The private sector is awash with conference space and state-of-the-art facilities, developed at great expense and in need of more business, and not less. It doesn’t make sense for the Trade Fair Corporation to go into head-on competition with them, but I have found that in these matters, sense is usually the last factor to be brought to the negotiating table.

If the Trade Fair Corporation believes that today’s generation of teenagers and young adults are going to be furnishing and equipping their homes by trawling around the July fair in search of products and prices in the dust and confusion, they are right out of touch and poised to become an anachronism. The July fair is a dead duck, floating in the water, and over the next 10 years its skeleton will have sunk to the mud at the bottom of the pond. There is about as much future for the “international” trade fair as there is for the manufacturers of vinyl records and cameras that take rolls of film.

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I don’t know enough about the SmartCity project to get into the controversy of how much of it is going to be developed as real estate, and how much as a business park. I’m not against attractive development in any case, because most of the time it’s an improvement on what was there before. Honestly, I can’t understand all these people who campaign against particular development projects, most often without knowing the details, when they must be able to see that the real ugliness in Malta is caused by conglomerations of individually-built private homes, one more hideous than the other.

No – what really struck me about the SmartCity information that has made it to the media is the number of jobs that will be created: 5,000. I’d like to know how they reached that figure. Now we have been told that 60 per cent of that number will be jobs created in information technology, and the government has said that this reflects the sound basis of information technology education in Malta.

Well, I don’t know about that. Kids are leaving school unable to read, write or add up. Many don’t even sit for O-levels, and a vast number of those who do bother fail them – so it’s a mystery to me where information technology figures in that equation. All the people I know between the ages of 16 and 50, who are wizards with computers, are self-taught. By this, I mean that they either taught themselves, literally, by using manuals or watching others, or they fixed up their own training privately, in Malta or elsewhere.

Sixty per cent of 5,000 is 3,000. That means that SmartCity, if and when it comes to fruition with the promised number of jobs, will need to recruit 3,000 people with some kind of training in information technology. As any Maltese employer will tell you, it’s going to be an uphill struggle finding 3,000 people who can read, write and use common sense, so where are these thousands of IT professionals going to come from? I have a sneaking feeling that the people who will fill those jobs, always on the understanding that the jobs are actually created, are going to be the citizens of other EU member states. If they do recruit Maltese people, they will have to head-hunt them from their existing positions, leaving those companies searching desperately for replacements. I’m not saying let’s not set up SmartCity. I’m just saying: let’s not get too excited about this.