Thieves plunder commodities in US

CALIFORNIA: In a bizarre new trend, organised gangs are now targeting agricultural commodities to make some quick bucks.

In a spate of crimes involving agricultural commodities, gangs are raiding rural America to plunder commodities ranging from wheat to almonds, copper wires to hardwood trees.

According to media reports in the US, those involved in this thefts are bog gangs and petty thieves. Lured by the prospect of making easy money, criminals enter private and state-owned forests to illegally fell timber, carry off entire shipping containers of almonds, and risk their lives to strip electricity transmitters of their copper wiring.

Another interesting factor is that as the price of a particular commodity increases, it becomes the target of thieves.

In California, two-thirds of its 311,000 residents live from farming.

According to agricultural crime task force, when fuel prices moved up, there were a lot of gasoline thefts. Right now there is a rise in metal thefts.

With California almond prices tripling between 2001 and 2005, when they went from 91 cents a pound to $2.81, thieves have also turned to wholesale almond theft.

The thieves didn’t go to the trees or fields to take the almonds. They waited till the almonds were processed and loaded into containers for shipment, and then stole the whole container.

Wheat, which has doubled in price since January 2007, is being stolen by the elevator-full in the Great Plains.
Timber theft is widespread around the country on private forestlands, national park forestlands, industry forestlands.

With a hardwood from the Appalachian mountains in Virginia fetching more than $1,000 for a single tree trunk and given the vastness and remoteness of many forests, timber theft is a route to easy money for thieves.

A lot of owners have forestland but don’t live there. And even if you have somebody helping or maintaining the forest or looking out, a thief could go deep in the forest, take the wood and get out.

Tree farmers are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year to thieves.

Agricultural theft cost US farmers an estimated five billion dollars in 2006-7, according to a report by the Urban Institute in Washington, while metal theft alone cost California farmers 10 million dollars in the same period.

Many of the stolen commodities are off-loaded to a buyer who is several hundred miles away from the scene of the original crime.

The almond thefts took place up to 300 km away from Sacramento but wound up in a warehouse in Sacramento to be distributed around the US and Europe.

A big market for metals stolen on the West Coast of the United States is China.

The cost of agri theft is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher food prices or to the farmer in the form of lower profits.

Stealing timber can upset the environmental balance in a private forest, and stripping the copper from railway or electrical wires can put the lives of the thief and other people in danger