It was a glorious day even by Malta’s standards and as I do every so often I decided to leave the Saturday hustling and bustling of the straits of the city to venture through the narrow and winding pathways of a rural, quaint area of our country. Together with my wife it was decided that our end-of-week treat should take us to Mellieħa.
While for plenty of ramblers the sounds and perfumes of nature build up towards the soothing engagement they look for when in the countryside, I rather prefer to stop and converse with those toiling the soil – our country’s farmers.
Sunburnt as they are used to be under the scorching sun and with hands as rough as a precious hide, the brusque and unrefined farmer is a derided figure in our society hell-bent as it is to earn more, have more and determined to lead an ever-increasing luxurious life.
And as I bid good morning to the fine gentleman de-weeding a field of cauli-flowers, I followed up with what I knew was the key to releasing the stuffed Jack-in-the-box in the farmer’s mind springing out to hit you hard every time the lid is left ajar: how’s work going?
Because I know exactly the tribulations of our food-producing sector and the pains of our farmers, I found his answer very predictable until he said something that left me uneasy, frustrated and helpless at the same time. Given that it was close to useless to continue sweating to barely break even his expenses, his sons oblivious to anything remotely related to their father’s vocation and a future that is bleak to say the least, the farmer started cursing his luck that his fields are in an ODZ.
He asked me if I know of someone that wants to buy his fields.
“I can barely make ends meet and I have no time for my family. I missed the upbringing of both my children and I’m still here, with my face against the soil trying to make a plant grow.”
No matter how numb you become hearing these words day in, day out from one farmer after another, it still hits something deep within you that makes you stand still, listen and inculcate in you something between helplessness, anger and disbelief.
For one must admit a shred of incredulity that in our discourse on the challenges we face to manage our groundwater better, very few have elucidated that even though agriculture is one of the main users of this resource it is also a crucial contributor to the recharging of our water table by tending thousands of hectares of permeable surfaces.
We will soon have a strategy to manage Bitcoin but we don’t have one yet on how to feed our nation
It is similarly illogical that in our pretensions of biodiversity rhetoric we fail to realise that only through the restorative and regenerative actions of our farmers that flora and fauna can proliferate in our shrinking countryside. And these are only two of the innumerable services our agricultural sector offers every single day. Yet we flout and marginalise the contributions of our rural workers.
But let us all reflect on the main purpose of this noble sector, the production of food. In a country that has a history of adapting to the lives and eating habits of its colonisers and that has an embedded psyche that tends to value satiety more than ingredient freshness, it comes as no surprise that the culinary objectives of the Maltese might not be necessarily conducive to the prioritisation of a resilient food producing sector.
Because, we might think, as long as we have a satisfactory range of products on our supermarket shelves, then there is no reason to complain. Without going into the merits of the importance of eating local, I posit that there is a fundamental flaw in that argument.
Let’s take Qatar as an example, a small state in the Arabian peninsula – which receives 99 per cent of its food from outside the country due to it being mostly made up of deserts, unsuitable for the production of food.
Almost two months ago, its neighbours and other countries decided to cut diplomatic ties with the nation for reasons beyond the scope of this article to discuss and which also lead to their cutting of air, sea and land links with Qatar – fundamental for the transport of food to Qatar.
This is seriously jeopardising the normal day-to-day lives of the Qataris whose political establishment is now looking to other countries for the supply of their food. Food security has been on the political agenda for a considerable number of years now, so much so that some time ago Qatar reached a deal with Kenya to lease 40,000 hectares of land for the Qataris to grow their food on.
The country is truly striving to avoid having food security as an Achilles heel but, as the present diplomatic crisis is showing, it’s proving to be easier said than done.
Having our local supermarket shelves brimming with the most varied of products is no guarantee that we are food secure. We cannot really think for one minute that, in the face of similar adversity, we can turn to our food-producing sector for respite and solutions. We have exhausted and eroded the sector through and through and what we have now is a faint glimpse of what it once was.
What is so deeply troubling and bizarre in more ways than one is the fact that we will soon have a strategy to manage Bitcoin but we don’t have one yet on how to feed our nation. Fifty years of steering an independent country through highs and lows has not managed to put such a fundamental issue on the political agenda as of yet.
Our climate is no desert and we are blessed with the gentlest of conditions to grow our food. Our successes in other spheres of governance and social life should embolden us to dissect this issue and strive to achieve a food-secure nation for the benefit of present and future generations. It is only thus that we can promulgate the message of having a holistically prosperous and resilient nation.
It is through giving our rural stakeholders like the Mellieħa farmer above reason to continue to produce food that this can be achieved and let’s do this quickly before it is too late.
Malcolm Borg is deputy director at Mcast’s Institute of Applied Sciences, in charge of the Centre for Agriculture, Aquatics and Animal Sciences.