Times of Malta recently reported the exorbitant prices farmers are expected to fork out to buy land. At €100,000 per tumolo – 24 times the EU average – they are being priced out of agricultural land, a precious primary resource for our country. Many others risk losing their long-standing tenancy of lands they tilled for generations.

Lack of access to land is but one of the banes faced by the agricultural sector, whose low contribution to the national GDP is the result of a persistent effort to neutralise it. The NSO had sounded the alarm bells in February 2022, when it reported a 6.2% loss in agricultural land over a 10-year period – and that figure is set to grow.

The misery is compounded by other figures: over the same period, 14.8% of the agricultural holdings were shut down, the workforce declined by 25.8%, and 55% of the agricultural holdings do not have a succession plan in place.

In this scenario, farmers are still operating within a feudal system; the present laxity in planning regulations has seen many a farmer being evicted, since agricultural land sold for development has become a shinier opportunity for bigger profits.

This is also the result of the way in which the local plans were devised to favour speculation, with huge swathes of publicly-owned agricultural land being sold off to private interests, then made available for development ten years later.

So far, Robert Abela’s administration has refused to budge on the ‘policy’ dictating the use of agricultural land; while the prime minister and his ministers claim that government land will no longer be given away for private speculation, the intricacies in planning regulations and land ownership – coupled with the farmers’ lack of resources to fight off evictions – see the government colluding with private developers.

Such is the case of Tal-Bebbux in Żurrieq, where farmers have once again been notified with a development application on a plot of public land less than a year after Lands Minister Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi had declared it won’t be sold for development. In this case, the government will be allowing its land to be used for infrastructure complementing the construction of two adjacent plots.

This is but one example of how agricultural land is disappearing, dragging the fortunes of the sector with it.

The causes are not limited to individual planning matters, ODZ swimming pools or an increase in the sale of agricultural land for recreational use (another by-effect of the unkept promise for more open spaces).

It is even more evident nowadays that there is no strategy or policy regulating land use in Malta: the government has no interest in reining in land speculation, for fear of upsetting the construction concrete cart. The government has no interest in using its own land for agriculture to mitigate the impact of price hikes; it prefers to distribute subsidies to grain importers. The government has no interest in regulating the market to protect the weakest link in the food chain, saving livelihoods from financial ruin and demotivation; instead, a free-for-all with tinges of feudalism prevails.

There have been few initiatives from the Ministry for Agriculture since its inception: the law on land leases is far from perfect, and there has been no opposition whatsoever to the government’s liberal dishing out of public agricultural land for development.

In fact, schemes promoting organic farming in a country where land itself is scarce indicate a total disconnection from the realities farmers face on a daily basis, with genuine questions arising as to whether the government is really interested in agriculture at all.