Av­o­ca­do in­ject­ed with in­sec­ti­cide can be iden­ti­fied by a "black/rot­ten" spot that will ap­pear on it, the Min­istry of Food Pro­duc­tion, Land and Ma­rine Af­fairs ad­vised in a news re­lease yes­ter­day. The re­lease said the min­istry was alarmed by the act of one farmer plagued by prae­di­al lar­ce­ny which led him to in­ject­ing hun­dreds of av­o­ca­dos with an in­sec­ti­cide. "Prae­di­al lar­ce­ny con­tin­ues to im­pact neg­a­tive­ly on the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor. To ad­dress this prob­lem the min­istry this year up­grad­ed its Agri­cul­tur­al In­cen­tive Pro­gramme in the area of Se­cu­ri­ty. This will as­sist farm­ers by sub­si­dis­ing se­cu­ri­ty in­puts that would bet­ter en­able them to se­cure their hold­ings," said the re­lease.

The new in­cen­tives list­ed in the re­lease are:

• Re­bates of 50 per cent of the cost of an ap­proved se­cu­ri­ty sys­tem against prae­di­al lar­ce­ny, up to a max­i­mum of $30,000.

• Re­bates of 50 per cent of the cost of fenc­ing farm­land pas­tures, up to a max­i­mum of $25,000 per hectare.

The re­lease said the Min­istry's Le­gal Unit is ac­tive­ly re­view­ing the Prae­di­al Lar­ce­ny Pre­ven­tion Act and in­tends to in­crease the fines or terms of im­pris­on­ment for var­i­ous of­fences. It said farm­ers are re­spon­si­ble for keep­ing up to date records on their crops and adop­tion of key com­po­nents of Good Agri­cul­tur­al Prac­tices as part of the Farm Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Pro­gramme of the Na­tion­al Agri­cul­tur­al Mar­ket­ing and De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (NAMDE­V­CO). The re­lease said there are cur­rent­ly 1,200 farm­ers en­rolled in the pro­gramme with 800 al­ready cer­ti­fied. "This cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gramme, along with the new­ly es­tab­lished Reg­is­ter of Pro­duc­ers, will al­low for trace­abil­i­ty of pro­duce and en­able rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties to bet­ter man­age any fu­ture sit­u­a­tions of this or a sim­i­lar na­ture," the Min­istry said.