NEWS | Wednesday, 01 April 2009

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Not all champagne and roses: HARRY VASSALLO documents the environmental neglect that also characterised Eddie’s reign

At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, our Prime Minister at the time spoke with disarming frankness. Our brand new Structure Plan for the Maltese islands, the reaction to and consequence of years of mayhem and corruption in the issue of building permits under the previous administration catered for 51,000 housing units, an excessive figure reached according to Dr Fenech Adami “under pressure from the construction industry”.
His government had made no such confession in Malta and the Development Planning Act which made the Structure Plan law was hailed as a monumental achievement in good governance.
The incident epitomises the Fenech Adami legacy in environmental matters. It was not ignorance that permitted the compromises, but a lack of values. A Green snob could assume that a man of his generation could not be expected to begin to understand the significance of his environmental failings; but in fact Fenech Adami appears to have grasped far more of the significance than he was given credit for. His own values, his generation’s outlook did not make him ignorant. It allowed him to neglect vital matters, to keep them low in his list of priorities.
The 2005 Census documented the fact that we have built 50,000 housing units more than we will ever need. Although the Census document was published late in 2007, an earlier publication would not have prevented thousands more housing units being built. Even now as property sales grind to a halt, more development projects come on line adding ever more thousands of housing units to our mountainous oversupply. Nobody in authority has had the courage to mention the desperate need to address this challenge.
It must have been Dr Fenech Adami’s dilemma also. The current paralysis is also part of his legacy.
His reaction to the anachronistic state-controlled economy of the Mintoff era made him head for laissez-faire as far as the traffic would allow. People marshalling vast sums of money must know what they are doing. Entrepreneurs are willing to take risks and they should be allowed to do so. The role of government should be to make this possible as far as possible. The collapse of the Soviet Union soon after he came to power coloured his outlook, reinforcing his technofix vision and allowing him to celebrate Fukuyama’s “The End of History” throughout his tenure as Prime Minister.
The fact that the misuse of land caused long term irremediable problems was simply dismissed. The immense waste of stone, our only mineral resource was dismissed without a thought. The damage done by expanding quarries never featured in government decisions. The fact that vast areas of countryside were extravagantly destroyed was not felt to be a sacrifice.
In economic terms we continued to perform the miracle of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps: as the economy grew, more was available for investment in property. Property speculation became the foundation of our economy. While the construction industry itself contributed no more than 5% to our GDP (little more than agriculture) it became the bottomless pit for investment, sucking in resources from every other productive sector. Everybody seemed to be making money but there was nobody who looked at the overall picture and adverted to the dangers which no single operator could address. The government had deliberately abdicated its role.
To be fair, the setting up of the Planning Authority and the Environment Protection Department were epochal steps in the right direction. It took us years to realise that they remained quite toothless. Still they collected the data, they documented our situation and outlined the necessary policies. As in Rio, ignorance was not the cause of our neglect. Everything we ever wanted to know was available somewhere on a shelf at the PA or EPD. When the State of the Environment Reports began to be published, the last shred of an excuse for ignoring the facts was gone. It made no difference at all.
The hallmark of the Fenech Adami era has been precisely this: the collection of data and the documentation of the facts in a far more professional manner than ever before, only for them to be blissfully ignored.
The final irony comes with EU membership. The EU Commission funded and insisted upon the most scientific of all documentation exercises. Never before had our challenges been so carefully quantified. The adoption of the EU environmental acquis represented a 20-year leap forward in providing the legal hardware to address these challenges. It also made addressing them mandatory. This is unquestionably Fenech Adami’s greatest positive contribution to the Maltese environment. It can be regarded as an accidental by-product of his and his party’s determination to join the EU.
The fact that his successors negotiated the greatest possible delays in transition periods and then delayed further, is also part of his legacy. They have his attitude: to be seen to be addressing the issues while in fact we proceed at the slowest pace possible. Somewhere in that vision is the idea that environmental protection and life quality issues are a luxury while earning money now must override all other considerations. The permanent destruction of ecological assets was never accounted for and the liabilities we have incurred for all future time thanks to our misguided policies and the non-implementation of beneficial policies could not influence political decisions.
In many ways the Fenech Adami era seemed to be greener than the Mintoff era, but in fact it was the same or worse. Instead of defiant violence we have had consistent lip service but the trend continued unchanged, except that it gained in momentum. It was worse also because the appearance of competence and due process lulled the public into the false sensation that matters had improved.
The EU, currently the world leader in addressing climate change, has set itself the target of reducing carbon emissions by 20% from its 1990 levels by 2020. Going by the facts as established by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, achieving this target will permit a catastrophic rise in global temperatures with incalculable economic consequences. The EU is missing the IPCC target by 5 years. Its proposed reduction should be achieved by 2015 in order to minimise (not even to prevent or reverse) climate change to tolerable levels.
Fenech Adami, in going only as far as the traffic will allow – also in the knowledge that the long term results will be disastrous – has been a trailblazer for the EU. His toxic legacy in environmental matters is not a particularly heinous crime. It is standard among mainstream politicians. Nobody in his position attempts the impossible because the alternatives are unthinkable. Everybody acts as though the dilemma did not exist, disregards the evidence, discounts expert advice and refuses to think.

Harry Vassallo was chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika/The Green Party, and a member of the Moviment IVA Malta Fl-Ewropa

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