Page 7 - Malcolm Borg News Today

Farmers’ sales are slashed every time the European Union publishes another instalment of its “flawed” pesticides report, according to a local lobby group. Malcolm Borg, who heads the Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi, said farmers’ sales dropped by up to 25 per cent whenever the EU’s food safety agency released its findings on local pesticide use.  The repercussions, he said, last a few weeks after the report is made public as it puts many buyers off supporting local produce.  This, Borg said,...

Malcolm Borg, who heads the farmers’ lobby group, Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi, said the ban on chlorpyrifos had only just come into force when the tests were conducted. This, he noted, meant farmers would have likely been trying to use up a stock of the chemical they had invested in when the tests were done.  The European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) report also says that legal action was taken against an unspecified group of Maltese farmers after they failed routine pesticide screening for a number...

The rules governing pitkala middlemen who auction farmers’ produce are set to be overhauled after tensions boiled over last month.  The government plans on contracting these middlemen, previously self-employed, to provide the auctioning service for farmers twice a week.   In April, Times of Malta reported how all of Malta’s registered pitkala had their licences suspended after they refused to put a guarantee in place to stop farmers from being left in the lurch.  For the past few weeks...

With no pitkala in sight, food agency takes over running of food market Farmers step in after pitkali refuse to increase bank guarantees, but they also fear Pitkalija could end up being privatised 4 May 2021, 12:22pm by Paul Cocks “We do not want to end up working from people who will make a killing off our hard work, while we get barely enough to scrape by... I hope they know that our interests do not include bringing in big businesses to run things” A stand-off between the agriculture mi...

December to February this year saw more than double last winter’s rainfall at 141mm compared to the super low 66.8mm, but it was still way below climactic

He said he and the prime minister were left thinking hard about how they could plan contingencies for such a situation. “Malta has almost never been self-sufficient in terms of food security. It’s almost impossible I think, both due to the fact that we live on an island and that there is a high population density,” Borg said. “But, certainly, the percentage of food produced locally stands to improve and put us in a better situation than we are at present.” He said that about three-qua...

This very conservative estimate is already three times the price of arable land five years ago. According to a 2016 EU research paper on agricultural land prices, one tumolo of land cost slightly more than €14,000. Back then, this was already expensive, with European prices ranging from €178 per tumolo in Sweden to €8,000 in the Netherlands and €10,500 in the Canary Islands. Malcolm Borg, who chairs Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi, told Times of Malta that farmers looking into acquiring arable l...

Two of Malta’s leading agricultural NGOs say they are receiving an increasing number of reports from distressed farmers worried they could be kicked off their land, following a landmark court judgment last November. The two NGOs sounded the alarm after the Constitutional Court ruled that the Agricultural Leases Act, which grants tenants an indefinite right of renewal, breached a landlord’s fundamental rights. That judgment was the first to back owners of agricultural land – often worth mi...