Avocado or zaboca comes in a variety of sizes and colours. All taste just as good with roti as with bread. You can eat in slices or make a chokhaa with it. It is also a tasty and expensive item so many people mistakenly think that they can have their zaboca and eat it, by planting a tree in their property. Soon they come to realise that money saved by not having to buy the item is dwarfed by cost in damage to property and the trauma inflicted by marauding zaboca harvesters.
Pilfering of fruits and vegetables is endemic in Trinidad. There is no respect for boundaries, fences, walls or ownership. Pipers and petty thieves, in their quest for the quick buck, will scale walls of any height. Broken bottles on the top of wall, a standard deterrent of bygone days, is now obsolete technology as is barb wire. They have been replaced by the now omnipresent razor wire. Reports filtering in from communities indicate that razor wire technology is fast losing its edge.
Chain link wire fences, especially those with razor wire at the top, bring a huge grin to the faces of the thieves. They simply cut the wire at the base and enter. To present a credible deterrent, one needs to have a facade of razor wire over the entire fence; or alternatively, an electric fence. Clearly protecting one's property is becoming an ever increasingly expensive endeavour.
Not too long ago, a person frustrated with zaboca thieves, alleged that a poisonous substance had been injected into his zabocas. Naturally no such thing was actually done, but rather born of desperation as the only remaining method to stop the thieving of the produce. Well, like the gentleman before him who confronted and injured a zaboca thief, he felt the wrath of the law; no doubt much to the pleasure and amusement of the zaboca thieves.
To date no attempt has been made to address the transactional side of the supply chain. Why are sellers of avocados not required to have a bill of sale or receipt from the supplier. This is not a sledge hammer approach to killing a fly. Far from it, the trade in stolen agricultural produce is rather large and growing as food prices increase.
To give an example at a picking, one may get 4 to 50 avocados from one tree. The large ones sell for about 40 to 50 dollars retail. One may pay $20 to $30 for it wholesale. This translates into $800 to $1,500 for the zaboca thief for an hour or two of "work". This is equivalent to a week to a fortnight of work at the low end of the labour scale. No wonder praedial is a growing activity.
So to stop the thieving of fruits and vegetables and praedial larceny, all retailers must be able to show receipts for the produce they have in their possession and further, all wholesalers must be able to show proof of ownership of the produce they have. For this to work, community policing has to be strongly enforced as the thieves tend to sell their loot to a person in the community; over to the Agricultural Rangers and community police.
But back to the avocado trees; if one were to ask any person who had (notice the past tense) an avocado they would indicate that in order to not have persons entering their property, they prefer to cut down the avocado trees. In fact the number of avocado trees that have been cut down is staggering. If the death of the trees is to be attributed to anything, then one might surmise it to be the curse of the "avocado tree."
Prakash Persad
Director, Swaha Inc.
prakash.persad@yahoo.com
