Your columnist Mark-Anthony Falzon (The Sunday Times, August 23), like a drowning man, clutched to the proverbial straw by commenting on the export of bambinella for a chance to denigrate the socialist government of the Seventies and Eighties. He tried to compare the positive development of the export of our delicious micro-pear to the experimental exporting of capers two decades ago.

Dr Falzon even came out with the fabrication that we exported this to the Communist regime of North Korea. Wrong. We exported it to West Germany at a very good price.

As for the introduction of the caper industry on a bigger scale, our cuisine fared only better, unless you belong to the fish and chips brigade. Apparently, Dr Falzon knows nothing of many things including that of keeping capers in a saline solution where they last for years.

Moreover, a local gardening entrepreneur has succeeded in developing a method of growing plants from seed, bypassing the bird plant seeding. I understand he is exporting the plants to Italy.

Regarding North Korea and our farmers, the latter rubbed their hands with glee when they were given free sacks of the fertilizer urea donated to us by that country. As for our economy at the time, we still have SGS (now ST Microelectronics) with us, for one thing. We were then very strong in economic terms and we did not have the national debt piling up at the rate of about one million euros a day.