The Nationalist Party has urged the government to help farmers contain a rapid rise in their costs, so that it would not impact food security.

In a statement, the shadow ministers for finance and for agriculture, Jerome Caruana Cilia and Toni Bezzina, noted a report in The Sunday Times of Malta about farmers struggling to contain spiralling costs of fertiliser and plastic mulch, caused mostly by the war in Ukraine.

Times of Malta had reported that the cost of his fertiliser has shot up by 40 per cent in the last three months alone. Farmers are also forking out more on plastic mulch, which is used to conserve water in the soil and suppress the growth of weeds.

The current situation, the shadow ministers said, put food security at risk, and the government needed to intervene and shoulder at least part of the burden before a crisis developed.  

The country also needed to take steps to reduce dependence on inorganic fertiliser and to revert to natural fertiliser, already found in Malt, with care being taken for the water table.