(Barbados Nation) What is one of the worst sights a farmer can ever face?
The owner of Brighton Plantation, Michael Pile, says it is coming to grips with the realization that months of hard work has been stolen away by a thief in the night.
“There is nothing more soul-destroying than to go into a field, which is a few weeks away from being harvested, early in the morning and seeing it has been absolutely ransacked,” he told the SUNDAY?SUN at the office of his St George plantation on Friday.
The scourge of praedial larceny is a continual, never ending problem for farmers in Barbados. And Pile said that contrary to statistics, it was not decreasing at all.
“It is not that crop theft is down; people are just so fed up they are simply not reporting it anymore,” he said.
Pile said he spends large amounts of money to keep his crops as safe as possible, saying he had spent more than Bds$10 000 hiring people to keep watch “from dusk till dawn” for the past two and a half months. He also said he had spent more than Bds$6 500 in vehicle repairs because of constant use patrolling in cart roads.
“We have an ongoing problem with crop theft but around two and a half months ago, it started to get worse so we started watching the fields from dusk till dawn. On an average week, if it isn’t me, it will be one of my workers in the fields at night with bright lights.
“However, I’m not going to ask any one of my workers to accost any of these guys as the minimum they (the thieves) would have is a knife,” he said, adding they used the lights to run people “two or three nights a week”.
Despite this, he said they had lost Bds$15 000 in stolen carrots and potatoes in 2012. He said this type of theft would continue to plague farmers until Barbados got serious about the problem.
“There is no real serious penalty for crop theft so I can’t even blame the police because to go through all the trouble of catching someone only for a small penalty . . . .”
Pile said crop thieves were not the most discerning of individuals and would gladly destroy hundreds of pounds of young carrots just to reap a hundred pounds of mature ones for their own profit. He said they also could not know and did not care that the crops they stole might have recently been sprayed and were not fit for human consumption.
Managing director of Armag Farms Richard Armstrong experienced exactly what Pile was describing last Friday morning. By the time he had reached the fields on Kelly Land in Colleton, St John, around 1 500 rods of sweet potatoes were missing – gone in a night.
He said praedial larceny could not be a small-time activity given the sheer amount of produce involved.
“I am concerned with the amount of stealing going on. Someone big in this country is responsible but my biggest beef is with the police for not taking this seriously. If it was gold, they would be after them,” he said.
To make things worse, the particular kind of sweet potato stolen was the variety Armstrong was trying to cultivate for his food processing business making sweet potato fries. He said it was at least fortunate they were not in the middle of full-scale production.
“The fries project is on hold as the equipment we had was not able to meet the demand so we are in the process of setting up a much bigger plant. Hopefully in March we will be producing yam and sweet potato products and later, breadfruit and corn products, once people don’t steal them all first. If we were in production now, a blow like this would have halted it or caused us to substitute an inferior product,” he said.
Armstrong said Kelly Land was not their only property being hit by thieves as they had reports of thefts at Cow House Land in Sunbury, St Philip; Leaders in Hampton, St Philip and Lodge Line in St John. He said it would be far too expensive to place fencing around all their property because if they did, they would have to pass on the high cost to consumers.
Armstrong listed his losses as follows: at least Bds$30 000 in potatoes for the year and Bds$60 000 in cassava which he had only recently started producing on a regular basis; a vehicle replacement at the cost of Bds$89 000 because of wear and tear being used 24/7 in cart roads, and the cost of the watching the crops.
