THE GOVERNMENT seems determined this time to seriously tackle the problem of praedial larceny that has plagued the farming sector for ages. In dispatching, on the first working day of the new year, 50 recently trained Special Constables to strategic areas of the country it has sent a message that it means to keep its word to the Jamaica Agricultural Society made in July last year.
We are encouraged at the apparent urgency with which the Ministry of National Security has approached the exercise for it is evident from the report in last Thursday's Gleaner that much behind-the-scenes work had been done in identifying the routes and markets used by the praedial thieves.
What is of concern, however, is the delay in enacting of legislation to establish the use of receipt books in all farm produce transactions. This is important because the success of the programme hangs on the possession by farm produce traders of a valid receipt when stopped by the police. We were made to believe that such legislation would have been passed by November of last year. It has not yet happened and this must be an embarrassment to the Prime Minister who committed himself to the programme at that JAS meeting in July, as it must be as well to the Ministers of Agriculture and National Security.
Praedial larceny is estimated to cause some $4 billion loss to farmers and is one of the biggest disincentives to investment in the sector. Individual farmers in attempting to reduce their losses are forced to spend millions of dollars each year in security measures. This has the inevitable effect on cost of production resulting in high prices to consumers. But it doesn't stop there. It puts our produce out of the competition on the export market and is increasingly doing likewise on the domestic market as well. This is too important a matter to be thwarted again by bureaucratic apathy.
The Government needs to be more decisive in this matter and to implement the entire programme at once and not in a piecemeal manner as it now appears to be doing. Otherwise it will all come to nothing like all the other attempts.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
