The essence of praedial larceny is simple: it is stealing someone else's agricultural produce or livestock. You know it when you see it. So, when I read this morning that the Barbados Agricultural Society is hoping to use electronic means to deter praedial thievery (see Sunday Sun report), I wondered if they were considering the plight of people like me. I am no farmer, but a mere urban dweller. I am someone who loves the land and I have grown fruit and vegetables in some of the world's best known cities. I also have a father who has grown produce and raised livestock, mainly for his own sustenance, in rural and urban settings alike in Jamaica and England and now again in that crime infested island of Jamaica. Where we differ is that no one has ever stolen his crops. Now I have to live the scar of that crime on my life.I had two banana trees planted in my little piece of land in St. Michael, and I had shown my little daughter how they were growing well, and faster than her. I had travelled recently and wondered why I had not seen any bananas on the trees as yet. Then it dawned on me. The trees are adjacent to a wall and there is a large garden on the other side. That garden is safeguarded by extensive barbed wire, presumably to keep out thieves. It is also the home of a senior legal person. Imagine my despair, therefore, to find a stump hanging over the wall from my banana tree when I examined it a few days ago; a freshly cut stump at that, dangling into my neighbour's garden.
Now, true, for the legal eagles this is all circumstantial and then there is the issue of what to do about a neighbour's plants or livestock that stray beyond their boundaries. All of that is nice to discuss, but simple things need simple minds. The bananas belonged to me and my family. Slice the matter anyway you like: we tended and cared for them to bring us satisfaction in some way. We did not raise them for our neighbour's benefit. What of the harm the hanging fruit was causing? Give me a break! If my legal neighbour has a case to deal with that concerns praedial larceny I hope that he had not recently dined on my bananas for that to stick in his craw.
We live in a neighbourhood with lots of monkeys and parrots and other birds, all of which like bananas and guavas and mangoes to differing degrees. I have seen monkeys in the house trying to get food. I have seen birds pecking at the mangoes and guavas. But I have never seen any of these wild things wielding a cutlass. My mind boggled when a legal friend or two suggested that the monkeys might have been to blame. I shuddered as I could not easily imagine being mugged at gunpoint by a monkey. Mind you, better that than the image of a swooping flock of parrots wielding cutlasses.
Now, the sanguine part of me says that if someone needed those bananas more than me, for food or income, then so be it. But I still have my disappointment to handle, and my daughter's. I will manage her disappointment and I will give her the life lessons. The message I will give her will be clear: stealing is wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.
Have a blessed day.
