Local fruit production is to be given top priority at the government’s nursery, as foreign fruit trees will be phased out in favour of indigenous ones and local fruit variations.
Malta’s only accredited fruit propagation nursery – the St Vincent de Paul Nursery – will be working to make local varieties of fruit trees, which are more suited and adapted to the Maltese climate, available to the farming community.
The production will include pomegranates, loquats and black and white mulberries, among others.
“Local varieties of fruit trees are under threat of disturbance or disappearance and mostly at risk of genetic erosion,” a spokesperson for the Agriculture Ministry told Times of Malta.
He said this was due to increasing dependency and cultivation of foreign commercial varieties.
This, in turn, was leading to a greater chance of plant pests and diseases, detrimental to the Maltese flora, being introduced.
“Such genetic resources, being of traditional, agricultural and cultural importance, need to be conserved in order to halt their eventual extinction,” he added.
Their sustainable use and the superior characteristics, compared with those of foreign varieties, were, therefore, being promoted.
The spokesman said the nursery will concentrate all of its efforts on the production of fruit trees that have adapted to local environmental conditions and which are sought after at national level for their particular characteristics, such as maturation time, drought resistance and taste.
Malcolm Borg, the president of the farmers’ lobby group Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi, welcomed the initiative.
“Indigenous fruit trees are part of our heritage and adapted better to our climate,” he told Times of Malta.
“More than anything we need to put value in our indigenous breeds. We have a very rich heritage of such fruits and we need to have farmers producing them and, more importantly, have customers asking for them.
“One way farmers can resist competition from imported produce is to grow something that cannot be produced, or doesn’t make sense to produce, in other countries,” he said.
“This should also be paired with an aggressive campaign to create demand. People’s priorities when they buy fruit is definitely not to choose indigenous varieties so it would be useless to have farmers producing them and not able to sell them.”
The nursery has merged with the Plant Protection Directorate, which will be equipped with local fruit tree mother blocks for conservation purposes and a nursery for scion and rootstock production.
It will also be holding a final sale of foreign fruit tree varieties to exhaust current stocks before starting planned production of local fruit tree varieties.