26 Avocado Theft Busters Rewarded With the Green

The California Avocado Commission has paid out more than $10,000 in the past four months to 26 people statewide who reported or captured avocado thieves.

The reward money is being disbursed from a $30,000 fund the commission established in July. The reward is part of a $774,000 anti-theft program that included the hiring of a three-member undercover investigation unit of county sheriff’s deputies.

Avocado theft became a lucrative enterprise as the wholesale price of avocados in recent years approached and then exceeded $1 a pound, commission spokesman Howard Seelye said.

In San Diego County, Valley Center was the avocado theft hotbed during the past four months. The rural community was the scene of all five county thefts in which witnesses intervened or took time to report what they saw to authorities.

San Diego County residents took in about a third of the total $10,234 awarded.

Ten different San Diego County residents were given reward money in amounts ranging from less than $100 to as much as $1,000, with the highest amounts going to witnesses whose reports resulted in convictions.

In all, 19 thefts were reported in San Diego, Riverside and Ventura counties.

Cumulatively, the eyewitness reports led to the recovery of about $10,000 worth of fruit that otherwise would have been sold on the black market.

The commission estimates that thieves steal 5% to 10% of the state’s annual crop, a volume that, at this year’s wholesale price of $2.25 per pound, is valued at between $10 million and $20 million, Seelye said.

Tom Barbour, an inspection official, said the reward program and increased publicity about avocado thefts has helped break the public’s previous apathy over the problem.

“What we’re seeing is a heightened public interest in reporting avocado thefts,” Barbour said. The three-deputy unit of the Sheriff’s Department, he said, isn’t “going to break the back of the avocado-theft problem, but 3,000 watchers just might.”