The Green Party has challenged Agriculture Minister Anton Refalo to stand up to his cabinet colleagues and declare himself against the continued take-up of arable land for development purposes.
“Why does it not declare itself against the continued approval of applicants by the Planning Authority?” ADPD chairperson Carmel Cacopardo asked of Refalo’s ministry during a press conference on Saturday morning.
Cacopardo, who is an architect by profession, was speaking in Qormi at the site of a proposed supermarket, to be built on arable Outside Development Zone land. The project is currently
He and ADPD deputy chair Sandra Gauci both noted serious incongruencies in the government’s environmental policy. On the one hand, the government has said that it wants to dramatically reduce car use by 2030. But on the other, it continues to allow projects that encourage car use, such as the Qormi one, they noted.
Similarly, the Planning Authority continues to endorse an ongoing “attack” on agricultural land by approving permits to extend roads and develop “recreational areas” to the detriment of farmland, they said.
“The Planning Authority has the legal remit to stop this but it has continuously failed to act. This madness must be stopped immediately, before it is too late,” insisted Gauci.
Cacopardo noted that the Agricultural Ministry has acknowledged that eco-systems are slowly being eroded, having written in its Agricultural Land Reform White Paper last OCtober that “when the acquisition and possession of land are not controlled, there is a risk of farmers losing agricultural land, to the detriment of their livelihood, as well as to the country’s ability to produce food and safeguard the rural environment.”
Despite those fine words, the ministry appeared to be doing nothing to stop the “unbridled destruction of agricultural land,” Cacopardo noted.
“The Ministry of Agriculture should take the necessary action to ensure that lofty ideals expressed in documents are carried out in practice by ensuring that public projects as well as the policies carried out by government agencies and institutions consider the intrinsic value of agricultural land in their decisions,” the ADPD leader concluded.