Attorney General Wilfred Abrahams has called for farm theft, widely known by the archaic legal term of praedial larceny, to be treated with far greater urgency, warning that growing complacency is allowing organised theft from farmers to flourish and threatens national food security.
“I think we need to get serious in relation to praedial larceny. Praedial larceny… sounds pretty. Praedial larceny is thieving,” he declared on the floor of the House of Assembly on Wednesday during the Budget debate. He insisted the crime should not be softened by euphemistic language.
Abrahams highlighted what he described as a troubling, everyday reality for farmers, particularly those in the sugar cane industry.
He said he had recently forwarded a detailed complaint from a farmer to the prime minister, the agriculture minister and the minister for justice, underlining what appeared to be organised rural theft.
Abrahams said: “I got a very long email, sent to me by a farmer who keeps passing by Bussa [Roundabout] every single morning – he’s a cane farmer – and every single morning by Bussa, you see persons with trays piled high with cane neatly packaged. They have it in season… they got a lot now.”.
The AG argued that while there was often sympathy for economically vulnerable individuals, there must also be recognition of the damage caused when theft becomes systematic and unchecked.
“We talk about praedial larceny and we like to talk about the poor Black man and I firmly back the poor Black man,” he said. “But if one poor Black man robs somebody else systematically, day in, day out… and that person closes down their business so that 100 poor Black people don’t have a job, who has won?”
He warned that such acts, if allowed to continue, contribute to a broader erosion of respect for law and property.
“You don’t go and rape acres of somebody’s cane field… because it doesn’t stop there. It is an emboldening thing that says we don’t respect the laws of Barbados. We don’t respect other people’s property,” he said, adding that theft can easily expand beyond crops to other goods.
Abrahams cautioned that a failure to act decisively on praedial larceny could undermine national efforts to boost agricultural production and strengthen food security, particularly amid global uncertainty.
“If you can thief cane, you can thief mangoes… you want to thief everything,” he said. “And then when we are trying to get people to grow our crops, become food secure, we cannot be disincentivising farmers by not prosecuting people for praedial larceny.”
(SB)
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