I heartily endorse David Marinelli’s fears, comments and proposals as expressed in his lucid article (‘Risk of fresh water shortages’, The Sunday Times of Malta, October 15). Freshwater supply is critical and subsequent governments have lacked the courage to deal with this problem, always kicking the can down the road onto future generations.

This crisis started in the 1970s when our water table was being seriously over-extracted and tap water became brackish. People suffered months of prolonged water outages. Having cancelled two distillers which had been ordered during the previous administration and were on their way to Malta already, and after many other false moves, Dom Mintoff was eventually forced into accepting reverse osmosis plants as the only solution.

It was, in fact, in this period that the Maltese people had to start buying bottled water for drinking. Tap water, when available, was undrinkable. The reverse osmosis plants have in fact helped enormously: the water generated is mixed with the ground water to make it nominally acceptable.

As the population increases and more and more tourists visit our islands and our consumption per capita increases, the situation has deteriorated beyond control. The pumps draining our water table through illegal boreholes are draining precious water that belongs to the Maltese nation as a whole. This practice can be enjoyed only temporarily, as at this rate, in the next few years it will become unacceptable even for their use.

It is absolutely paramount that those few boreholes needed to make bottled water and drinks are properly registered, licensed and monitored so that they pay a fair price for this precious resource. All others and especially those used for agriculture should be closed. We must revert to the traditional agricultural products which do not require huge amounts of water.

Various studies in different international fora and universities have established that an enormous amount of water is required for making and growing the food we eat in addition to the water consumption recorded in our homes and businesses.

Beef production uses around 15,000 litres of water to produce one kilogram of meat. Pork uses 5,000 litres. On the other hand, vegetables require much less: cabbage uses 240 litres/kg and tomatoes 210 litres/kg. The grain for one kilogram of bread requires 1,400 litres of water. In our case, thankfully, this is imported. We must accept that with our water situation it is much more economical and sustainable to import rather than grow products which require larger amounts of water. Fred Pearce in his authoritative study ‘When the rivers run dry’ deals extensively with this problem on a worldwide basis.

Similarly, cheap summer sunshine tourism requires huge amounts of water which is not reflected in the prices. Malta must work much harder to promote high-calibre tourism where the numbers might be less but the net balance for Malta would be higher. This would also help reduce the overcrowding of our roads and our country!

Exceptions could be made for those old water mills pumping water from shallow water tables which are not utilised by the Water Services Corporation. Hefty fines and serious punishments must be imposed on people operating unregistered boreholes. A serious effort must be made to save our water.