Editorial | Farm theft now organised crime

Peter McConnell’s recent anecdote about what happened at his company’s farm largely confirms what this newspaper has long argued; farm theft in Jamaica is no longer small-time hustle, if it ever were.

It has evolved into organised crime, which means that authorities have to develop new approaches for dealing with the problem, including making it a focus of the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA), the independent law enforcement body that investigates sophisticated crimes.

There might also have to be an adjustment in the nomenclature of, and by extension, how we think, and speak, about the crime. The term praedial larceny is old, dated and conjures the idea of petty hustlers snatching small amounts of crops from fields. Instead, there are sophisticated, organised criminals engaged in big business, sometimes involving complex supply chains to get their goods to market.

At a panel discussion on crop yield optimisation and supply chain resilience, Mr McConnell, the CEO of Trade Winds Ltd, an agricultural and agro-processing entity, disclosed that his firm has been using drones to survey its fields for crop thieves.

Trade Wind felt that its activity was covert, and that it was ahead of the criminals.

The advantage it thought it had didn’t last for long. Only a month!

In Mr McConnell’s telling, one evening recently, a supervisor called to check whether Trade Winds’ drone was in operation over a section of the farm. It wasn’t.

“It turned out that the thieves were using drones to monitor our security,” Mr McConnell reported. “That’s the level we have gone to. It’s (the stealing of agricultural products) a very serious problem.”

At the same forum, David Crum Erwing, operations executive at GraceKennedy, the financial services and food conglomerate, spoke of a shortage of scotch bonnet, which has affected supplies to processors. This, in part, has to do with theft.

“Several farmers have lost fields which have been raided overnight, where they have lost 20 to 30,000 pounds within 24 hours,” he said.

DEMANDS SOPHISTICATED INTERVENTIONS

Agriculture accounts for about eight per cent of Jamaica’s GDP. It employs nearly 200,000 people. It is however estimated that between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of annual farm output is lost to theft. That’s over US$55 million (J$8.6 billion) a year.

As this newspaper noted previously, few businesses, except monopolistic corporations, or firms that enjoy heavy taxpayer subsidies, could survive with the level of leakage.

Which helps to explain the low levels of investment in the sector, and the low productivity in agriculture and why farmers tend to be old (the average age is over 50 years) and work plots, averaging two acres.

Farmers and the authorities have lamented the crisis of praedial larceny for decades. Governments, including the current one, have perennially promised to fix the problem.

Last year the fines and jail terms for farm theft and trafficking in stolen agricultural produce were massively increased.

In January, the agriculture minister, Floyd Green, promised that agricultural wardens, a type of farm police, would be rolled out this year.

“We are not just talking about it; we have already started to recruit our agricultural wardens,” he said.

But the law allowing for the establishment of this corps, which is to work alongside the regular police, has been in place since the early 2000s. Similarly, the requirement for farmers and agricultural traders to be registered with the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA), and for traders to be able to show proof of purchase of produce, has existed for decades.

These systems, however, have not been robustly enforced, partly because of a lack of manpower. The presence of agricultural wardens (300 by 2028, according to Mr Green) might help.

But the character of praedial larceny has changed significantly over the past two decades or more. So, too, must be the approach to fighting the crime. While there still exists what praedial larceny is perceived to be, there exists alongside it the larger problem of organised crime.

The larger element of farm theft won’t be solved by agricultural wardens only.

People with drones surveying, where security officers are, are not seeking to steal a few pineapples or oranges. They are into sophisticated, organised theft. They are likely to have organised product transmission chains and secured markets.

Disrupting these networks demand sophisticated interventions from an agency like MOCA, to infiltrate and break their supply chains, and to bring the organised gangsters to book.