Sacrificing our agriculture

The idea that any government can give its blessing to building on agricultural land is truly astonishing, especially so on islands as small as Malta and Gozo.

I recall the Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientist and first director of the Food and Agricultural Organisation, John Boyd Orr, who believed that the best hope for humanity was for every nation to produce enough food to feed itself.

Until the 1950s or thereabouts the Maltese islands produced abundant food of exceptional quality, as many writers about our island have testified. This is not to suggest that Malta and Gozo can still be self-sufficient in food yet now it does not seem to alarm our government or the Malta Environment and Planning Authority that building on agricultural land is a crime, to say nothing of the monstrosities which now appear on former agricultural land ostensibly to promote tourism.

Incidentally, such building does nothing of the kind; discerning tourists are fleeing from our islands because they don’t like to spend their holidays on what appears to them to be a large, noisy and dusty building site.