A landlord has detailed to The Malta Independent on Sunday how a significant number of farmers are merely posing to be so in order to retain their hold on farming land which they are occupying on an agricultural lease.
Under Maltese rental laws, agricultural leases (known as qbiela in Maltese) are protected – meaning that neither can the landlord end a lease, nor can they amend the rental fee which they receive for the said lease.
Land being leased out on an agricultural lease can only be returned to the landlord if the person leasing it passes away with no heirs or if the land is left untouched in terms of crops for more than two years.
A recent court judgement, where a protected agricultural lease was declared to be a breach of the constitutional rights of the landlord, has set an important precedent for the years to come.
It is a precedent which has been debated widely, with many sounding a warning that if nothing is done, farmers will be forced off the land which they till, hence killing the agricultural industry and leaving the land in a state of abandon.
However, there is another side of the story: that of the landlord himself.
A landlord, who operates his own agricultural business but who preferred to remain anonymous, has told The Malta Independent on Sunday that not all is as it seems, and blasted claims that agricultural land will suddenly become ‘picnic areas’ as “utter rubbish.”
Indeed, he describes the situation as a complete “injustice” for landlords and says that people who claim to be farmers have resorted to certain tactics to ensure that they can keep the land, even without setting a foot in it, and to other, even illegal, practices to try and make a fast buck.
One common way of making sure that something is grown in the field is by growing animal feed – or qamħ in Maltese.
“You can sit at your desk, or at home, or eating at your kitchen table, and call up someone to sow some qamħ – he’ll go with the tractor and do it, then you can – again from your home or kitchen table or wherever – call him in October to harvest it and ask him to bale it up and sell it for you. You wouldn’t even have laid a foot onto the field, but you’re considered a farmer. And while you’re paying me €7 per year, you can get €1,000,” the landlord explains.
In other cases, he adds, there have been occupants who had sub-letted the land – something which is completely illegal. One occupant even allows one of the local village feast każini to let off fireworks from the field: “so much for taking care of the land,” the landlord laments, while in another case someone has even turned the land into a kitchen garden open to the public, using a reservoir as a pool.
“We do have farmers who are real farmers. I recently went to inspect one of the fields, and the farmer there told me that he plants tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes, onions and a host of other things… I wouldn’t even think of taking the land from him because he is earning a living,” he says.
Those genuine farmers believe that people who just plant animal feed to keep a hold of the fields give a “bad name” to the industry, the landlord adds.
The landlord’s family currently operates a successful agricultural business, specialising in boutique, high-end products which are made from home-grown ingredients but, as they explain, there is no possibility for them to expand because, simply put, they cannot use their own land.
The alternative to buying new land, he explains, is to reach an agreement with the current occupant to vacate the land – but that’s something which even then comes with the need for some sort of financial compensation to the occupant: something which he describes as absurd, considering that the land doesn’t even belong to the occupant.
It’s not something that always goes to plan either.
“We have a piece of land which has a farmhouse and quite a large field which is occupied by someone. He doesn’t do anything with the land… he just uses it to plant animal fodder… and the farmhouse is totally dilapidated… it would take a huge investment for us even to fix the farmhouse alone,” the story begins.
“I remember asking him if he would be interested in leaving the lease and told him that I’d be willing to give him some form of financial benefit even if I didn’t need to. After two months of back and forth, I finally asked him whether he’d reached a decision on what he’d like – the reply was ‘Yes… is 120 good?’ – I was shocked and I remember telling him ‘Do you want me to give you €120,000 to leave my own land? Are you mad? Do you want me to buy my own property to get you out?’”
Needless to say, it’s not a transaction which came to pass.
As he recounts other cases, he whips his phone out and shows another tract of land with a farmhouse close by which is leased out to someone else: such is the state of abandon that the ceiling of the farmhouse has caved in in a number of different places – something visible on Google Maps’ satellite view.
“It’s a disgrace. When the land does eventually come back to me, I then have to renovate it as a vernacular building with kileb and xorok and so on – if I count all the qbiela we received for this particular place over all these decades, then it doesn’t even begin to cover the costs involved. We are sick of it,” he says.
The reality is though that it’s either this course of action, waiting for the occupant to pass away, or having to navigate through the legal maze that is Malta’s – and even Europe’s – courts.
In fact, the landlord says he currently has 30 separate cases – all filed to try and get their land back – currently on-going in court.
To add further insult to injury, if and when the current landowner passes away, the landowner’s heirs must pay their succession duty based not on the qbiela being received for the fields, but based on the fields’ actual market value.
A more elderly landlord speaks of how she was 21 years old when her father passed away and spent the best part of the following 20 or so years paying off the succession duty on the land which she inherited.
The major question of course is: does anyone in authority – or who would like to be in authority – exhibited any willingness to change the situation?
“The government is not interested in solving the issue as the demographic that will be affected is tricky for them, and the PN is being populist – I saw [PN chief spokesperson] Peter Agius on NET addressing a press conference warning that farmers are going to be losing ‘their’ land, when the land isn’t even theirs! And while he was speaking, all you could see behind him were bales of animal feed!,” is the disappointed reply.
This isn’t a matter of money though as some might think – even if the money currently being received in these leases is a pittance (one lease was described as being €4 per year, and another at €7 per year).
“This is a huge injustice which has been on-going for far too long. The problem isn’t the money for us – it’s that we don’t have the right to decide what to do with our own land. I need the land to increase my production, and to employ more people. This is the concept nobody is talking about,” the landlord says.