Praedial larceny — the theft of crops and livestock from farms — costs Jamaican agriculture heavily every year, discourages investment, and pushes farmers out of production. It is usually framed as a policing problem: catch the thieves. But the thief is only the middle of a chain that runs from a field to a buyer, and the reason the theft pays is that stolen produce launders cleanly into the market. There is no way, at the point of sale, to tell a stolen yam from a lawful one.
This is a traceability gap, not merely an enforcement gap. Stolen produce is profitable precisely because the food chain cannot distinguish it from legitimate produce. Close that gap — make legitimate produce provable and unprovable produce hard to sell — and the economics of the theft collapse from the demand side, where policing alone can never reach.
This paper reframes praedial larceny as a chain-of-custody problem in the food supply, identifies where the chain currently breaks, and offers four recommendations to the Ministry of Agriculture for a traceability-led response that makes the market itself hostile to stolen goods.
Follow a stolen crop. It leaves a field it does not belong to, passes to a receiver, enters a market or a middleman, and is bought by a vendor or a consumer who has no way to know its origin. At every step after the theft, the produce is indistinguishable from lawful produce. That indistinguishability is the entire business model: the thief is paid not for stealing but for selling something the market cannot question.
Policing attacks the theft — the one link that is hardest to observe, occurring at night on remote land. But the chain has other links that are far more visible: the receiver, the market, the point of sale. A response that makes those visible links demand proof of lawful origin attacks the theft where it is easiest to reach, by making the stolen good unsellable rather than by catching the thief in the act.
Jamaica lacks a practical way for a farmer to prove that produce is lawfully theirs, and for a buyer to require that proof. Receipt-book and permit schemes exist but are inconsistently used and easily forged or ignored. Without provable origin flowing with the produce, the market cannot refuse stolen goods even when it would prefer to — and the theft stays profitable no matter how many thieves are caught.
Legitimate produce should carry a lightweight, hard-to-forge proof of lawful origin — a documented, verifiable record linking the goods to a registered producer. The proof must be cheap enough for a small farmer to use and credible enough for a buyer to rely on. Provable origin is the foundation; everything else depends on it.
Traceability works only if buyers require it. Markets, supermarkets, hotels, and processors — the concentrated demand points — should be enabled and, where appropriate, required to demand proof of origin for the produce they buy. A few large buyers requiring proof reshapes the whole market's behaviour.
Proof of origin presupposes a register of who legitimately produces what and where. A practical producer registry — usable from a basic phone, not a bureaucratic ordeal — is the backbone against which any origin claim is checked.
With traceability in place, enforcement shifts from the invisible theft to the visible market: a vendor selling produce with no provable origin is now the observable offence. Policing becomes a check on a documented system rather than a hunt across dark fields.
Build or strengthen a producer registry usable from a basic mobile phone, so that lawful origin has a backbone to be checked against. The registry must be simple enough that the smallest farmer uses it, or it protects only the largest.
Provide a lightweight, hard-to-forge proof of lawful origin that travels with produce from farm to buyer. The proof must be cheap for the farmer and credible for the buyer; both conditions are required or the market will ignore it.
Enable and, where appropriate, require the large concentrated buyers — supermarkets, hotels, processors — to demand proof of origin. Reshaping the behaviour of a few large buyers closes the market to stolen goods faster than any number of arrests.
Direct enforcement toward the visible market links — produce offered for sale without provable origin — rather than solely toward the theft itself. Traceability converts an unobservable crime into an observable one; enforcement should follow it there.
Praedial larceny persists not because Jamaica cannot catch thieves but because the market cannot tell stolen produce from lawful produce, so the theft always finds a buyer. Attacking the theft alone attacks the one link in the chain that is hardest to see. Closing the traceability gap attacks the theft from the demand side — it makes lawful produce provable and unprovable produce hard to sell, so that stealing stops paying regardless of how many thieves are apprehended.
A farmer who can prove ownership, a buyer who can demand proof, and a register that anchors both: these turn the food chain itself into the enforcement mechanism. Human Intelligence LLC is prepared to support the Ministry of Agriculture in designing the traceability backbone this response requires.