The agriculture industry often swings wildly between highly profitable and/or satisfying and extremely frustrating, with rarely any buffer in between. Much of this is systemic; much, if not all, of the world’s food system is broken and the Philippines’ is no exception, especially when compared to some of its neighbors. This not only includes market forces and inadequate government intervention, but unsustainable practices that often result in food waste, discouragement and disillusionment among agriculture workers (usually due to a low profit margin and widespread discrimination against their industry), and the like.

There are also factors that cannot be controlled, like climate change; difficult to eradicate, like pests and diseases; and perhaps most annoyingly, because they are in theory the easiest to change but in practice, actually the hardest: human behavior.

Much (if not all) of this stems from ignorance among the general populace (My favorite and most horrific example is the time someone on the internet angrily and haughtily told me that farmers don’t deserve to get paid livable wages because “tilling the fields is enough reward,” as if farming was easy and all farmers lived inside a bubble of complete and utter joy). Some have to do with culture, others through lack of education and curiosity about the world beyond the confines of one’s tiny life.

As someone who spends a disturbing amount of time on the internet (it’s for work, I promise!), I sometimes come across amusing ways Filipinos try to circumvent human behavior in an effort to protect their harvests. Some of these have to do with theft. Because there’s a prevailing belief that it’s easy to grow things in the Philippines, and there’s also a misconception that because plants are God-given and thus, free for anyone to take, it’s very easy for people not to think of taking fruits or cuttings from other people’s plants as theft. And because Filipinos tend to be non-confrontational (and because not everyone has CCTVs or electric fences), they can get very creative about their theft deterrent measures.

Here are a couple of examples. Since this is a column without photos, you’ll just have to imagine what I’m talking about.

An acquaintance posted a photo of a papaya tree with unripe fruit located within picking distance of a fence. To deter passersby from simply reaching over and plucking one or more of the delicious fruit, the property owner has written “No Trespassing" in large capital letters on the fence, and next to it, still in capital letters but in much smaller print, the reminder that “Kung hindi ikaw ang nagtanim, hwag mong aanihin,” or “don’t harvest it if you didn’t plant it.”

A simple reminder that just because one can take something, it doesn’t mean it’s theirs. It’s also a reminder that planting and cultivating are human acts that require intention, effort, resources, and care, and that just because they’re located outside and require natural things like sun, soil, and water to grow, it doesn’t mean that it’s free for anyone besides the owner to harvest.

Someone else showed me a social media post with a photo of a mango tree whose green fruits were on the way to ripening. The camera had focused on the tree owner’s ingenious yet simple way of keeping track of the number of fruit on the tree, which was by numbering each one with (I assume, waterproof) marker. The photo showed mangoes marketed until 48, but that was just one side of the tree.

Both of these can’t actually keep a determined thief (or one that can’t read very well, for that matter) from simply taking the fruit, but the hope is that they are enough to prick at the conscience and serve as a reminder that what they are doing (or about to do, or are thinking of doing), is in fact, theft.

These examples may be amusing and they may be relegated to small orchards and gardens instead of vast fields, but their effect is no less devastating. On a larger scale, theft is a big part of what keeps our agriculture industry from growing and thriving. On a larger scale, these can mean things like corruption, smuggling, food waste, theft of time and labor via unjust earnings or wages, or just good old-fashioned taking a large amount of crops or livestock that aren’t yours (as opposed to the odd piece the examples above presume), and so on.

As imaginative and amusing as these theft deterrents are, they are small reminders of some cultural habits that need changing: Just because something requires “natural factors” to grow, it doesn’t mean that they are ripe (or unripe, as some cases may be) for the taking.