The inexorable and unremitting encroachment on agricultural land has been a constant of the national planning and development regime of the past 20-30 years.
By virtue of its negligible economic contribution, agriculture has been assigned the Cinderella profile within the same regime, with concerns about the loss of fertile, productive land and of related livelihoods being persistently relegated to the back-burner, whether it was for the expansion of the existing road network or quarries or for the development of new residential development, schools, airports and additional infrastructure.
In fact, the fraction of the national footprint that is formally registered as farmland has plummeted from over 60 per cent in the 1980s to its current 47 per cent share, with the urban footprint, now amounting to 29 per cent of the total surface area, fast catching up.
Against such a backdrop, one can fully understand the angst among the farming community whenever any large-scale project targeting farmland is announced. PA 05313/20, which is proposing the development of greenhouses with capping solar panels on a gargantuan footprint exceeding 40 tumoli (40,000 square metres) on a mosaic of active and abandoned farmland as well as patches of natural vegetation in the form of steppe and garrigue, is one such proposal.
An enhanced awareness of the importance of natural vegetation (maligned in the past as ħaxix ħażin) as a food source for pollinators is also evident by the preponderance of beehives in the environs of the proposed site.
The site in question is strategically located in the interval between the hamlets of Żebbiegħ and Ta’ Mrejnu and the main village of Mġarr. Its endorsement would, thus, ensure the further consolidation of these three settlements into a single, urban fabric.
Proponents of the development counter that the deployment of greenhouses is consistent with Mġarr’s rural character, especially since the approach to the hamlet of Binġemma is riddled with conglomerations of such greenhouses, whose local distribution increased by 14 per cent between 2000 and 2007.
The same proponents also advocate the greater control which can be exerted over irrigation water and over agro-chemicals within the same installations as well as to the contribution that renewable energy can make to national efforts at curbing greenhouse emissions.
A paradigm of land-use trends on the islands... the girna giving way to the tower crane.These are all valid arguments. However, as evident through a recent public consultation launch by the Planning Authority, disturbed sites such as disused quarries are the most congenial sites for installing solar farms, rather than active/abandoned farmland or natural vegetation. Additionally, the control of climactic conditions within the same greenhouses necessitates a greater energy outlay, which offsets, to some extent, the renewable energy contribution of the proposed, over-capping solar panels.
The national footprint formally registered as farmland has plummeted from over 60 per cent in the 1980s to its current 47 per cent share- Alan Deidun
Additional offset will probably result from the shading effect that the over-capping solar panels will exert on the underlying crops enclosed within the greenhouses, resulting in an enhanced reliance on artificial illumination to make the same crop growth feasible. The obviation of a patchwork of terraced fields, crumbling rubble walls, corbelled stone huts and straggling stocks of fruit trees by a monotone of shimmering glass and plastic, just a stone’s throw away from the Mġarr core, will inevitably wreak a deleterious landscaping impact, which cannot be simply mitigated through the planting of a perimeter of olive trees or through the re-construction of rubble walls.
Opposition to the proposal has swelled in recent weeks and not just from the farming community (like the eNGO Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi) but also from the public and this is heartening as it dispels to some extent the nimbyism label thrown at so many activist groups. Approving the proposed solar farm at Mġarr will set a dangerous precedent by implying that the uptake of considerable swathes of farmland for the deployment of solar panels is acceptable from a planning point of view, ushering in, inevitably, a flurry of similarly-souled applications in the future.
The disparaging way within which remaining swathes of farmland is held is also evident through a blizzard of additional preposterous planning applications which have been submitted in recent months. The ones which have hogged the limelight include the proposed drive-through cinema within ODZ farmland contiguous to Torri Mamo, in Marsascala, the uptake of more farmland to pave the way for a new flyover by Infrastructure Malta at Qormi (rightly denounced by former president Marie Louise Coleiro Preca) and a bonanza of sheep-farm applications, complete with proposed residential development, in rural areas of Gozo, such as Għasri.
The levity of the drive-through cinema proposal, spread over an estimated 5,000 square metres of ODZ land, is perhaps the aspect which has drawn most criticism from eNGOs such as Wirt iż-Żejtun and rightly so, given that the sacrifice of such a substantial parcel of land can hardly be justified through such frivolity. If approved, this proposal will literally pave the way for access by private cars, rather than by agricultural machinery, to fields leading to the St Thomas Bay slum village, causing further soil sealing and compaction, with impacts on the replenishment of the aquifer and on the fertility of the soil in the area.
The seasonal nature of the proposed amenity’s appeal carries a high risk of operational failure, with the restoration of the encroached fields to their former condition being highly doubtful once the commercial activity folds up.