Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1342444
12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 21 FEBRUARY 2021 Raphael Vassallo OPINION When the last field is gone, we will realise that… you can't eat tarmac IT seems to have gone largely unnoticed; but a couple of weeks ago, Economy Minister Clyde Caruana admitted in an inter- view that Malta faced the real threat of a major food supply crisis last year, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. "My blood ran cold when we were discussing Malta's food supply [between April and May 2020]," he told the interviewer. "We import most of our food and a lot of it comes from Italy, but workers in the Port of Genoa were planning to go on strike be- cause they were getting infected with COVID-19 and wanted a raise. […] Had the Port of Genoa shut down, a substantial amount of food that's imported to Malta wouldn't have come…" Whoa: hang on there, let me get this straight. Are we to un- derstand, then, that the closure of a single Italian port last March – just one – could have plunged Malta into a full-blown food shortage… of the sort we last experienced back in World War Two? Oh, OK, I'll admit that's a slight exaggeration. It's not as though we'd have been driv- en underground by Junkers 87 dive-bombers, or anything like that (although who knows, real- ly? Wars – like plagues – have always happened before, and can always happen again; and – un- like plagues – there is no chance of ever 'vaccinating' against them, either). But no, I reckon the emergency envisaged by Clyde Caruana was more along the lines of the 'Toilet Paper Wars' we all saw breaking out in Supermarkets last March: only this time, people would be fighting in the aisles over the last can of tuna, instead of the last roll of Scottex Casa. (In other words: a struggle for absolutely vital necessities, instead of mere 'luxuries'). And in any case, we would cer- tainly need at least a convoy or two, just to see us through the immediate crisis. For while a lot has undeniably changed since 1942… in some ways, this revela- tion only proves that our under- lying vulnerabilities still remain exactly the same today, as they ever were in the past. Now as then, we are still a country which depends on im- ports for around 90% of all its needs, including food; and – as Clyde Caruana was so 'shocked' to suddenly discover around 11 months ago – it still takes almost nothing at all to cut off our entire maritime and/or air-link to the rest of the world. In the latest case, the threat was caused by a microscopic virus imported from China in 2019. (Cue to obligatory LOTR quote: "Is it not a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing? So small a thing…!") In World War Two, it was our status as a strategic military asset – so suddenly thrust upon us by the changing fortunes of war - to be attacked by one side, and de- fended at all costs by the other. And the deeper you immerse, in Malta's millennial history of dependence on maritime trade, the more diverse the reasons be- come. The part we all know about the Sette Giugno riots of 1919, for in- stance, is that they were sparked by a steep increase in the cost of bread. But as recently-discov- ered documentation reveals, the inflation itself had been caused by a spike in the cost of insur- ing freight after World War I – mainly because of the lingering presence of unexploded mines in the Mediterranean. Different circumstances, yes… but they still boil down to Malta's sheer vulnerability, as a country with is (inevitably) over-reliant on imports. Besides: in all three cases – and I could add 'piracy' to the list, to cover pretty much all the remain- ing centuries and millennia – we are dealing with a disruption (re- al or potential) of vital supplies, on account of forces that are en- tirely beyond our national con- trol. And, well, that's just as true of today's circumstances, as it was for 1942, 1919, or any other point in Maltese history you care to name. The only real difference, as I see it, is that the news of Malta's ex- treme susceptibility – to scarci- ties caused by wars, plagues, nat- ural disasters, market forces: you name it – only seems to come as a 'shock' today. At all other times, it was just a self-evident, unavoidable reality of life, that all Malta's governing powers had to somehow factor into their plans, sooner or later. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is still reflected in all the laws and regulations they left behind. This is why - when it came to building Valletta, almost 500 years ago - the Knights insisted on a law that each household would have to have its own water-supply. (Or, for that matter, surrounded the city with granaries, to be perma- nently stockpiled with grain.) Even without factoring in the possibility of a second siege to contend with, the Knights clear- ly recognised the limitations of Malta's natural resources: well enough to be deeply concerned about possible shortages of vital supplies. And this is also why – much closer to our times – the 1990s Local Plans originally afford- ed considerable 'protection' to Malta's already severely-limited agricultural land (and with it, our capacity to generate our own food-supply). It wasn't just because the sight of farmers' fields is so much more pleasing to the eye, than the un- sightly concrete-and-tarmac landscapes we are choosing to replace them with today (though if it were up to me, that would be good enough reason on its own). No, it's also in recognition of the uncomfortable truth that our an- cestors were so clearly aware of, in their day… but which we seem to have lost sight of altogether: blinded, perhaps, by our collec- tive drunkenness in the recent 'years of plenty'. Malta has, in brief, always taken steps to ensure at least a modi- cum of self-sufficiency, in prepa- ration for leaner times ahead. (Not, mind you, that we ever were '100% self-sufficient' in the past. It wasn't even possible with a wartime population of 200,000; let alone today...) But I know of no other his- torical epoch, in a country that has been inhabited for well over 7,000 years, when the authorities actually took steps to limit our production of a vital resource (still less, the most vital of them all: food). And I certainly see no historical parallel whatsoever, for what can only be described as a government drive to eradicate Maltese agriculture altogether, wherever it tries to put out a tiny shoot… Yet that is precisely what ap- pears to be happening today. Even as the Economy Minister learnt, to his horror, of Malta's vulnerability in the food sup- ply sector… other sectors of his Excavators working on the Central Link Project