WASHINGTON (AFP) — A wave of crime is sweeping rural America, with organized gangs and petty thieves heisting commodities ranging from wheat to almonds, copper wires to hardwood trees.
Attracted by the prospect of making easy money, criminals steal onto 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.
"As the price of a particular commodity increases, it becomes the target of crooks because they're opportunists who are looking to make money," said Bill Yoshimoto of the Agricultural Crime Task Force in California's rural Tulare County, where nearly two-thirds of its 311,000 residents live from farming.
"When fuel prices went up, we saw a spike in gasoline thefts. Right now we're seeing an epidemic of metal theft," he said.
"There is so much copper wire coming in that we know a lot of it isn't scrap metal that someone's discarded -- they're pulling down transmission wires to get it," Yoshimoto added.
With California almond prices tripling between 2001 and 2005, when they went from 91 cents a pound to 2.81 dollars, thieves have also turned to "wholesale almond theft," Yoshimoto said.
"They didn't go to the trees or fields to take the almonds; they waited until they were processed and in containers for shipment, and stole the whole container off the truck," he said.
Wheat, which has doubled in price since January 2007, is being stolen by the elevator-full in the Great Plains, said Dusty Fritz, spokeswoman for the Kansas Association of Wheat.
Trees are being illegally felled in forests.
"Timber theft is widespread around the country on private forestlands, national park forestlands, industry forestlands," Brigitte Johnson of the American Forest Foundation told AFP.
With a hardwood from the Appalachian mountains in Virginia fetching more than 1,000 dollars for a single tree trunk, according to a report by the Forestry Department at Virginia Tech university, and given the vastness and remoteness of many forests, timber theft is a route to easy money for thieves.
"Suppose you have 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of forestland. There's no way you can monitor it all the time. 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," said Johnson.
Tree farmers are losing "hundreds of millions of dollars a year" to thieves, said Johnson.
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.
That's the official figure; Yoshimoto said as many farmers do not report thefts the Urban Institute estimates that "the actual farm loss is nine-10 times greater than what's being reported."
Many of the stolen commodities are off-loaded to a buyer who is several hundred miles if not an ocean away from the scene of the original crime, said Yoshimoto.
"The almond thefts took place up to 200 miles (320 kilometers) away from Sacramento but wound up in a warehouse in Sacramento to be distributed around the US and, we think, in Europe," he said.
A big market for metals stolen on the West Coast of the United States is China, he said.
"China's economy grew at an 11 percent clip last year, so they have a voracious appetite for raw materials right now."
The cost of agricultural crime goes beyond the dollars and cents figures on a police blotter.
It 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.
"Agricultural crime is a very large problem and it's growing bigger. But it's ignored by policy-makers," said Yoshimoto.
The US federal government has created the Agricultural Crime, Technology, Information, and Operations Network (ACTION), but the program is "in minimum operation mode because of budget delays," he said.
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