Crop theft ‘forcing’ top grower to scale back production

Veteran farmer Richard Armstrong, one of the leading producers of yams and sweet potatoes, said Thursday he is now seriously considering scaling back crop production after thieves stole up to 15 000 pounds of yams from his St John fields in recent weeks.

The sharp rise in farm theft during the Christmas period, he warned, has made farming at scale increasingly unsustainable.

Persistent and increasingly organised theft had pushed the grower to a breaking point, said Armag Farms’ owner Armstrong, stunned by the scale and frequency of the losses.

“Without a doubt, I think I’ve pretty much made up my mind that we’re gonna have to reduce the amount of food that we grow and base it on just what we can secure or secure as good as possible,” he said.

“Which is a sad, sad thing. Very sad.”

Armstrong explained that repeated thefts, particularly in the weeks leading up to Christmas, forced him to juggle limited security between his yam fields in St John and his sweet potato crop in St Philip. He said he had hoped to delay shifting security to St John, but heavy losses left him with little choice.

“I was kind of hoping not to have to move my security up there too soon, and then leave the potato down here unattended, but unfortunately I got some very big lashes just prior to Christmas,” he told Barbados TODAY.

He estimated that between 10 000 to 15 000 pounds (4.5 tonnes to 6.8 tonnes) of yams were stolen over a matter of weeks, with at least 3 000 pounds (1.3 tonnes) being taken in one night. He stressed that theft had become a commercial enterprise.

“It is crop theft, commercial crop theft. These people are making a living off of it,” Armstrong said, rejecting the continued use of the term petty larceny. He added that the losses were equivalent to “a couple of 40-foot containers of crop”, taken within a matter of weeks.

Theft from yam fields was particularly difficult to quantify, Armstrong said, as the starchy tuber’s growth pattern made losses hard to detect once vines began to dry down. He suggested a strong possibility that more pounds of yams may have been stolen.

Losses from sweet potatoes in St Philip were lower, about under 2 000 pounds (just under one tonne), but he said this was largely because potatoes were more plentiful and less profitable for thieves at present.

The scale of his Armag Farm operations, spanning nearly 50 acres across St John and St Philip, made effective security extremely difficult.

“Even if we were in one area, we could get stealing on a night from one half of the ground when the security is patrolling the other half,” Armstrong said.

The cost of security, he added, had become crippling. Reviewing his financial records over the past decade, Armstrong said the highest annual security bill came in just under $80 000, including hiring a private security firm.

“That’s not a cost that I can just go and add on to my products because we are price takers, we are not price setters,” he said, noting that potatoes were selling at roughly the same price as 40 years ago.

As a result, profitability depended almost entirely on scarcity, he explained, as the additional input cost to grow the crops was not being passed on to consumers.

“If I grow a yam, a potato in a year that there’s no scarcity, we lose money. It’s as simple as that,” Armstrong said, warning that this year was shaping up to be particularly challenging given lower yam yields caused by the severe August and September drought.

The experienced farmer described the mental toll of decades of theft as exhausting and demoralising.

“To go home from work every day and go to your house, get in bed at night, and all the time you’re wondering to yourself, how much of my crop am I losing. That is a nightly thing that I go through, and I have been going through it now for decades.

“It’s a very disheartening feeling. And there are numerous times where I have felt to myself this just isn’t worth it. It’s hard to get people that are not in this business to understand just what that does to you.”

Calling for stronger enforcement, Armstrong criticised the lack of implementation of existing legislation requiring receipts for produce sales.

He said that every time a customer buys from him, no matter how small the quantity, they receive a receipt.

“Ask them how many times in the last year that receipt has been asked for by anybody checking on them. Not one,” he said. “They could make all the legislation that they like, but if they don’t implement it, you’re only spinning top in mud.”

He also questioned why the Barbados Defence Force was not being deployed as a deterrent, pointing to Jamaica as a successful example.

“If I was a person stealing crops and I had any inkling that I may go into a farmer’s ground on a night and be caught by a group of defence force soldiers, it will slow things down, if not stop it completely,” Armstrong said, warning that continued inaction would undermine national food security.

“The island is losing because people like me who would go and try other crops; and import substitution ain’t gonna do it,” he added. “We just cannot secure it.” sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb