It’s a hot day outside. The court hall is new terrain for the farmer as he takes his position behind his lawyer. As arguments are made by lawyers on both sides and the judge asks pertinent and probing questions, the farmer is overwhelmed. For whereas the land in question is an asset for some parties in the room, a money-making opportunity for others and an object of legal consideration for yet other interests, for him it is the reason he wakes up in the morning, the place through which he relates with family, past and present.
That land is where he has worked in isolation and solitude every day of his life, sometimes with great pain and unimaginable hardship, to feed his family. Working the land has given him identity and meaning.
The landowner, sitting behind his lawyer, notices the farmer’s eyes welling up and looks away.
This is happening in our courts every week.
The dreaded residuals of our history, marred with the haves exploiting the have-nots and with aristocrats uninterested in the drudgery of the peasant majority, are being played out before us in this very significant of issues – the management of agricultural land.
The self-induced inferiority of the masses, that several of our past leaders, politicians and philosophers so worked and preached against in the hope of enlightenment, remains embodied in the fatalism of a significant portion of our society including farmers.
Fearing the worst, the farmer sees the battleground before him and gives up from exhaustion.
But the nation cannot afford the farmer to bow out. It cannot let the prospect of having the few attain immediate gains at the expense of future generations. It cannot let an interpretation of a ‘right’ be monetised at the expense of the common good. After all, isn’t the management of private land an individual right subject to the common good?
The nation cannot afford the farmer to bow out
At face value, the crux of the issue seems to be legalistic. Land owners have a fundamental right to enjoy the fruits of their possessions. This translates into: land owners have the right to get the greatest financial return from their possessions, whether they be a store in an industrial estate or a parcel of arable, irrigated land in a rural zone.
However, digging deeper, the issue becomes entangled in the dialectic between the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, or the common good.
Dewey would argue that the individual cannot grow and reach their fulfilment without a nurturing democratic community. On the other hand, he would also argue that a functioning democratic society cannot develop and grow if it does not nurture the growth of its individual members. There cannot be one without the other. They are in a dialectical relationship.
And this is not much different. How is the right to enjoy your private property safeguarded in relation to the wider common good, that is, securing food sovereignty, food security, the rural environment?
It is in this light that the White Paper on the acquisition and ownership of agricultural land, skeletal as it may be, provides a crucial framework within which the management of that land should be done. It proposes mechanisms to safeguard agricultural land, the major resource that offers this common good – food – to our country. It seeks to find a balance between the parties and contextualises the owner-tenant relationship that would be allowed.
More than anything else, it is a glimmer of hope for the farmers. It is a direly- needed support to the exhausted food producers. While these are waiting with bated breath on the mechanism that will be used by the government to work out the value of the lease they would need to start paying, they are relieved that the White Paper endorses and supports their efforts to provide food for the country and to safeguard our country’s open spaces.
The essence of this White Paper is governance. For governance is what is needed for a resource that is being used by all and sundry for all sorts of purposes. When a resource is scarce, it needs good management and the necessary, even if unpopular, decisions taken for the benefit of the majority.
We owe this to our country and our forefathers who toiled the soil to see our population through the toughest times of history. But we owe it mostly to our future generations who, when reading in history books on the sources of their food, can read that, when it really mattered, we trusted our beloved soil in the hands of those that can feed us.
Mario Cardona is deputy principal, arts and social sciences, at MCAST and founder member of Koperattiva Rurali Manikata.
Malcolm Borg is deputy director of the Centre for Agriculture, Aquatics and Animal Sciences at the Institute of Applied Science at MCAST and coordinator of Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi.