Alex Borg meets Robert Abela: Malta’s viral farmer takes muddy boots to Castille

Alex Borg in first meeting with Robert Abela: The Żejtun farmer who gate-crashed the national conversation
By Hot Malta Newsroom | Tuesday, 11 June 2024, 07:30

The air in Castille Place still carried the scent of morning pastizzi when Alex Borg, rubber boots dusted with Żejtun soil, mounted the limestone steps he had only ever seen on TV. Inside the Prime Minister’s office, Robert Abela rose from a leather chair that has hosted EU commissioners and oil CEOs, this time to greet a 54-year-old vegetable grower who had become an unlikely folk hero after a Tik-Tok rant about abandoned agricultural land went viral under the hashtag #AgriAlex.

“Morna, Alex. Nixtieq nisma’ minn fommek,” Abela opened, slipping into the colloquial Maltese that plays better in Whatsapp voice notes than in press releases. Over 40 minutes, the two men—born in the same hospital ward two years apart—sat beneath the portrait of Dom Mintoff and spoke about everything from EU nitrate directives to the price of ġbejniet at the Sunday market. By the time Borg emerged clutching a government-issued dossier stamped “Feasibility – Għalq Xlokk Irrigation Tunnel”, memes of the farmer photoshopped into The Godfather were already racing through Maltese group chats.

From field to Facebook: how a cauliflower became a catalyst
Borg’s crusade began in April, when he filmed himself standing in a half-finished reservoir that was promised in 2018. “I’m staring at €700,000 of EU funds turned into a mosquito swimming pool,” he told the camera, panning across stagnant water and discarded PVC pipes. The clip, shot on a cracked Huawei, clocked 430,000 views—astonishing in a country with 520,000 residents. Within days, bakers in Qormi were selling “Alex Borg ftira” topped with ġbejniet from his farm, and university students repurposed the footage into techno remixes blasted at Paceville clubs.

The phenomenon tapped a vein of rural frustration rarely acknowledged in Malta’s construction-boom narrative. “Suddenly my 16-year-old nephew wanted to know why tomatoes cost more than a Subway sandwich,” said Sliema café-owner Marisa Camilleri. “Alex made agriculture sexy, or at least meme-worthy.”

A clash of two villages, one island
Tuesday’s meeting was choreographed like a village festa: flags on balconies, camera crews perched on opposite rooftops, and a canteen server wheeled out kannoli “so the press don’t faint in the heat.” Yet beneath the theatre lay a cultural fault-line. Abela, raised in the Labour heartland of Żejtun and polished by years in Brussels, represents the glossy, service-economy Malta. Borg, who still ploughs the same three tumoli his father inherited in 1962, is a walking reminder that 1.8 % of the workforce still feeds the other 98.2 %.

“Kellna nidhrulek, Sur Prim Ministru, li l-agrikoltura mhix passatemp għall-weekend,” Borg said, sliding across a hand-drawn map of boreholes and rubble walls. Translation: we had to show you that farming isn’t a weekend hobby. Abela, visibly more at ease discussing tax brackets than topsoil, nodded and promised a “white paper within 60 days” on long-term lease conversions—government speak for maybe letting farmers actually own the land they cultivate.

Community ripples: what happens when a farmer gate-crashes policy
By evening, the Żejtun parish priest had added a prayer for “those who till the earth” to the rosary. In Valletta, a pop-up stall labelled “Alex’s Corner” sold out of fenkata stew within an hour, proceeds earmarked for the local food bank. Meanwhile, environmental NGOs cautiously welcomed the attention but warned against turning Borg into “a token scarecrow for photo-ops.”

Economist Stephanie Xuereb argues the encounter could recalibrate national priorities. “If even 5 % of the €350 million planned for road widening shifts to water-efficient farming, we reduce food imports and carbon footprint in one stroke,” she noted. Others are sceptical. “Remember the 2013 meeting with rabbit breeders? Nothing changed,” quipped PN MP Stanley Zammit on Twitter, echoing a widespread fear that today’s headlines become tomorrow’s wrapping for chips.

Still, for many Maltese, the image of muddy boots on Castille marble felt like a rare inversion of the usual power tableau. “My nanna kept saying, ‘Il-bidla tidhol minn fuq artna’—change walks in from our land,” said 24-year-old translator Lara Bugeja. “Yesterday she saw it literally happen.”

Conclusion
Whether Alex Borg’s cauliflower crusade wilts or blossoms now depends less on viral algorithms and more on the follow-through of institutions notorious for slow-rolling rural files. Yet the meeting has already achieved something no white paper could: it placed the smell of freshly-turned soil inside the corridors where GDP graphs usually dominate. In a country racing to build the next high-rise, a farmer reminded us that the most valuable foundations are still measured in centimetres of topsoil, not storeys. For one humid June morning, Malta’s dual identities—rural soul, urban hunger—shared the same air-conditioned room. The question hovering like a summer mirage is whether they will continue talking once the cameras switch off.