The installation of meters at 3,500 agricultural boreholes started yesterday, 18 months after the process was originally announced and a full 11 months past the original deadline.
Inaugurating the first metered borehole in Rabat yesterday, Resources Minister George Pullicino said he expected the process to take 18 months.
The new deadline means all the agricultural boreholes will be fitted with meters by May 2013, well over three years from the original end-2010 deadline. The minister attributed the missed deadline to “tendering delays” and to the government’s desire to source EU funds for the project.
Once the metering process is completed, the ministry will monitor water extraction and usage rates for a 12-month period, with it subsequently establishing water quotas for farmers based on farm size and the nature of the agricultural produce.
Farmers are almost completely reliant on groundwater for irrigation purposes. Although they can extract as much water as they like for free, the unregulated system has placed Malta’s dwindling supplies under growing strain.
The EU has warned the government it must implement measures to restore the quality of Malta’s groundwater resources to set quality standards by 2015. This implies a drastic reduction in extraction from boreholes.
21,000
litres a minute. The official rate of water extracted from boreholes
Malta Water Association secretary and hydrologist Marco Cremona felt the government’s time frames for borehole metering were “unacceptable”.
“These new time frames essentially mean no extraction quotas will be in place by early 2015 at the very earliest,” he said.
In the meantime, Mr Cremona said, Malta’s aquifers would continue to be over-extracted at the official rate of 21,000 litres a minute and without any effective controls “to the detriment of our children, who will inherit a huge water deficit and hefty EU fines”.
Mr Pullicino said regulating and metering boreholes was no easy task. “It’s easy to snipe and criticise but getting stakeholders to agree is another thing altogether.”
Farmers now understood borehole metering and the eventual quota system was in their own long-term interest, he added.
He was keen to emphasise how Malta was actually ahead of many of its Mediterranean neighbours in terms of water management. He compared the local situation to Cyprus, where farmers were still resisting the registration of boreholes.
“We are the only Mediterranean country to treat all its sewage effluent,” Mr Pullicino noted. He reiterated the government’s desire to further polish sewage effluent for use in agriculture or as a means of recharging aquifers.
Mr Cremona welcomed ideas for the use of polished sewage effluent but said concrete time frames and plans were still lacking. He pointed out that there was no allocation for such investment in the last Budget, contrary to the impression given over the past months.
He also posed an open question: “Once treated effluent starts being supplied to agriculture, will the government demand farmers close existing boreholes and allow aquifers to replenish?”
The meters, which are being installed free of charge thanks to €2 million in EU funds, are fitted with a battery-powered electronic module that will eventually allow them to be read remotely.