As I sit in a tiny osteria in a charming village in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna and listen to the restaurant manager as he comes to our table with every course explaining the local roots, traditions and sources of what is on our plate, I find myself stuck in an emotional intersection of fascination and despair.
For it is truly fascinating but equally desperate that our European neighbours can valorise their food so much and we are not very far away from closing once and for all most of our food-producing sectors.
Why are we so indifferent? Why are we so different from those who value their heritage on their plates? Lacklustre enthusiasm, that’s how I describe the reaction of most of my compatriots when I go about describing the story behind a plate they would be eating.
We conceive no heritage behind our food, no link with our rural landscape and no pride in our locally-produced bounty.
Food is a functional commodity that tickles our taste buds and nurtures our tissues – but that’s about it. We are thankful that food acquisition has become so convenient to meet our ever-so-hectic lives and trolley our way into oblivion as we weaken our relationship with the origins of our food in the name of progress and modernity. Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
There is no need to point any fingers at any particular political party because both major ones have contributed to this current state of affairs – a slow death by neglect.
Between 2016 and 2017, agricultural income decreased by more than nine per cent, meaning that farmers are now earning two-thirds of what they were earning in 2010. Which other sector has workers in the same situation?
Lately, we were told that the Malta-Gozo tunnel was an electoral pledge that the government is committed to keep.
Agricultural income decreased by more than nine per cent, meaning that farmers are now earning two-thirds of what they were earning in 2010
But so was the specialised agency to promote local products overseas, schemes to encourage part-time farmers to continue working the land, the introduction of provisions to identify young farmers, the improvement of the classification of traditional products for certification and promotional purposes, the improvement in the Pitkalija operations, the launching of insurance schemes for farmers and other pledges that were included in the 2013 Labour Party electoral manifesto but that farmers are still waiting for.
And what a long list we would have if only we can go through all unkept agriculture pledges in electoral manifestos since this country gained its Independence. This is the death by neglect.
But then again, Roosevelt knew what he was saying all along.
Why should we strengthen a sector that has assets we need for major and minor projects alike – the widening of roads for example. And can anyone put farmers’ minds at rest that their lands will not be taken for the Malta-Gozo tunnel or the motor racetrack?
And even if land is taken, why should farmers – demoralised and de-motivated as they are – bother or fight a whole lot?
Further still, if professional farmers give up, we would have even more land to give away to those that are asking for political favours in the form of their own piece of green space for their family to relax in on a Sunday afternoon.
And we can think that we are doing agriculture a favour by teaching it in secondary schools but one has to be disillusioned or in utter denial to think that students taking on this subject would become farmers.
So while we continue marvelling at the gastronomical delights of Tuscany and Paris during our summer holidays and let our own such heritage erode into historical remembrance, and while we lose one environmental guardian after another and then whine about the urban jungle we are living in, the sector continues to putrefy and suffer an agonising death by neglect.
Malcolm Borg is coordinator of Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece