Scrap metal prices – particularly for copper – have led to thieves stealing phone lines, plaques from public memorials, and all manner of farming infrastructure.

From Jennifer Steinhauer’s excellent piece in today’sTimes  :

The rampant thefts have left farmers without functioning water pumps for days and weeks at a time, creating financial loss and occasional crop devastation in a region still smarting from a spectacular freeze last winter.

Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of American life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper resulting from a building boom in Asia. Common in developing counties, metal theft is now committed in nearly every state, largely by methamphetamine users who hock the metal to buy drugs, the authorities say.

Thieves have stripped the wires out of phone lines, pulled plaques off cemetery plots, raided air-conditioning systems in schools and yanked catalytic converters from cars, all to be resold to scrap metal recyclers.

But perhaps no group has been as been as consistently singled out as California farmers, who provide roughly half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Irrigation systems, a treasure trove of copper, tend to be in remote places, out of the eyes of farmers and, until recently, law enforcement.

– snip –

Some sheriff’s departments in agricultural counties have rural crime units that investigate metal crimes almost exclusively these days, setting up sting operations in recycling shops and tagging copper bait with electronic tracking devices.

Metal theft from California farmers rose 400 percent in 2006 over the previous year, according to the Agricultural Crime Technology Information and Operations Network, a regional law enforcement group headed by Mr. Yoshimoto [Bill Yoshimoto, an assistant district attorney in Tulare County]. The numbers this year are equally high. Through the end of June, there were nearly 1,000 incidents of scrap metal theft on farms, causing more than $2 billion in losses, the group’s figures show.

Here in Kern County, there were 213 incidents of copper theft, the greatest number in the state.

“They go out and take a farm pump in the middle of nowhere,” said Sgt. Walt Reed, head of [the] county’s rural crime task force. “And they can pull the copper wire strands from the electrical wire box and get 60 feet of wire, remove the insulation and take it to the scrap yard for $2 to $3 a pound.”

Alan Scroggs, an almond farm manager in Wasco, knows the story only too well. Over the course of three months this spring, his irrigation system was raided five times by copper thieves; his well was hit twice, and the booster system that helps pump the water underground to irrigate the almond trees three times.

Copper thieves cut the wires in the conduit that runs to the power source, tie the wires to the back of a pickup truck and drive away, pulling the wire behind them and generally making off with roughly 75 pounds of scrap metal.

“When the sheriff’s department came out here for the third time,” Mr. Scroggs said, “they said, ‘I can’t believe I am here again.’ ”

Over the last 18 months, copper prices have hovered over $3.50 a pound, hitting $4 at one point, the highest price the metal has reached in recent memory, said Patrick Chidley, a mining and metals analyst at Barnard Jacobs Mellet in Stamford, Conn. By comparison, copper fetched 65 cents a pound in 2001.

“It is really the law of supply and demand,” Mr. Chidley said. “You have a lot of demand in China, where there is a big infrastructure build-out. Every building, every car, every motor, every wind turbine needs copper, and there are not enough mines out there to keep up.”

From Hawaii, where an accused copper thief is about to go on trial for felony theft charges, to Maryland, where a 41-year-old man was electrocuted recently after trying to cut through a high-voltage line in an abandoned discount store, stolen metals have filled a market void. This summer in Oakland, Calif., a memorial to 25 people who were killed nearly 16 years ago in a fire was stripped of stainless steel memorial plaques, and metal scavengers were suspected.

Let’s leave aside  the specious claim [2nd quoted graf above] that it’s all because of drugs and drug use – and please bear in mind that Steinhauer reported it as a claim – rather than endorsing the truth of the claim. Steinhauer has painted a very clear picture of how market forces drive illicit as well as licit markets. And she’s suggested – reasonably, I think – that at current record high prices – thieves are willing to undertake relatively low-risk larcenies and burglaries: unattended farm equipment.

Unattended infrastructure, of course, includes pipelines, water mains, power lines and lots of other things that we’d prefer to have where they are.

But what if prices go even higher? Is there a price at which it makes sense for thieves to start stealing copper from occupied buildings? Of course there is. Let’s just hope the market doesn’t supply it.