Angry farmers confront Pullicino during top-secret meeting
Charlot Zahra
Rural Affairs Minister George Pullicino was confronted yesterday evening by angry farmers from the 12th District at a ‘top-secret’ meeting at the Nationalist Party club in Mgarr, Malta.
This meeting was the third scheduled between farmers and the Ministry, but – according to the farmers – the only one for which the minister actually showed up. MaltaToday is reliably informed that the farmers were incensed at various problems, including delays in the processing of EU subsidies, the increase in water tariffs, the proposed new water meters, and various difficulties selling their products on the market.
At one point, when the talk turned to the situation at the Pitkalija (vegetable market), Pullicino was heard telling the farmers: “Don’t let them continue ripping you off” – a reference to the same issue of middlemen at the Pitkalija, brought up on Sunday by Opposition leader Joseph Muscat.
The meeting started shortly after 6 pm – an hour earlier than originally planned, having been rescheduled by the Resources and Rural Affairs Minister George Pullicino this morning.
But although the meeting was held in a public venue, and this newspaper was invited to send a journalist by the farmers’ themselves, as soon as a MaltaToday journalist tried to walk into the club he was approached summarily by Ministry Communications’ Coordinator, Keith Galea, and told that he could not attend the meeting as it was “not open to the public”.
“This is an informal meeting. I don’t know why you have taken the trouble to turn up,” Galea said.
It is not clear whom Galea was representing at that point: the government of Malta which employs him, or the Nationalist party which administers the PN club in question.
In any case, farmers were visibly quite agitated during the meeting, with various hand gesticulations and high-pitched voices directed at the hapless Minister.
It was third time lucky for Mgarr farmers, after Pullicino had failed to attend two consecutive appointments in Mgarr, increasing the anger of the farming community at the Rural Affairs Minister.
“After he did not turn up for the second meeting, we thought that he was going to take us for a ride,” an angry farmer who spoke to MaltaToday on condition of anonymity.
However, ministry official Ray Bezzina hotly denied that Pullicino had avoided meeting the farmers on two separate occasions.
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