Can you imagine Maltese farmers asking for the food they grow to be destroyed? Last month, the Wasteserv CEO, together with the Malta Food Agency and the environment and agriculture ministers, showed off new machinery to be deployed at the pitkali markets. This is intended to “process agricultural waste, such as vegetable and fruit scraps and tree trimmings to be turned into quality compost to be used by farmers”.
Environment Minister Miriam Dalli characterised this work as “promoting the principles of circular economy, reduces waste and recognises the value of waste”. Likewise, Agriculture Minister Anton Refalo outlined how this would support farmers and hailed the Food Agency, “which is responsible for the holistic process of local produce from production until it reaches consumers”.
The benefit for farmers is evident – the compost can enrich farmers’ soils, which in Malta are very low on the organic matter necessary to keep them healthy and fertile. And it does that while saving them some of the cost of purchasing very costly synthetic fertilisers and saving our water table from part of the risk of leaching from manure utilisation. In other words, a win-win.
And, yet, the dust had not settled on this launch that farmer organisation Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi announced that they had successfully lobbied the Food Agency to ensure this new machine will also destroy food that is not sold by the middlemen and turned into compost.
It seems counter-intuitive that all that effort and cost would go into producing perfectly good food, only to then waste more energy into turning it into something much less valuable and that it would be farmers themselves to lobby for this.
There is a rationale too behind this bizarre change: the farmers claim that this unsold food was being collected by third parties pretending to want it as (free) animal feed but instead selling it for a good price as food outside the pitkalija system. The farmer group opposed this on two counts: that this affects market price to the detriment of pitkali buyers and that farmers do not benefit from these sales.
No evidence for the former claim is provided but anybody familiar with the figures knows it is unlikely, given that once produce leaves the centralised market it becomes too small a part of total produce sold nationally to have a price impact.
Farmers cannot even act in their own best self-interest- Justin Zahra
The latter is the more authentic concern and, yet, it begs the question: how do they reconcile lobbying for land rights on the basis of ‘food security’ but then are happy for perfectly good food, which would otherwise be going to feed people, to be destroyed instead?
Why not find a transparent manner for this food to reach consumers who are willing to buy it? I asked these questions, and kudos to them, was actually given an answer: it would be ideal if this unsold food could be processed but we’re not there yet.
This epitomises how the inefficient centralised pitkali system – which has over two decades resisted true reform and become a ‘sacred cow’ impervious to fundamental change – distorts thinking about our food-chain to the point where farmers cannot even act in their own best self-interest.
Because the ‘ideal’ situation is not to turn unsold food into processed products (better value than compost but still the bottom category in terms of marketing standards and the price it could fetch) but to actually sell it outside the pitkali on the market.
Better yet: the ideal is for the actual production to be planned and then harvested/collected based on a farmer-friendly contract with fair terms, then processed/packaged and sold/distributed according to actual market demand, in a decentralised way.
This is, of course, impossible without fundamental reform.
The food agency experts who worked on the model launched by the ministers can be trusted to find an optimal solution for that food not to be wasted but sold legitimately in the farmers’ own interests – and the politicians would be well advised to listen to their own experts.
Justin Zahra is a former director of agriculture.