SANT CLIMENT DE LLOBREGAT, Spain – Drop those cherries, you’re under arrest. Crops and cops are converging along Spain’s journey through economic crisis: People enduring hardship are stealing the earth’s bounty from farmers to help get by from day to day.

Police have added the patrolling of farmland — sometimes on horseback — to their list of daily tasks. Farmers in some areas are teaming up to carry out nighttime patrols on their own.

In villages near farming areas, several thousand paramilitary Civil Guards, regional and local police are even setting up checkpoints to sniff out not drugs or drunken drivers but stolen fruit or farming equipment, like copper wire used in irrigation systems. The Civil Guard says sometimes its officers mount “cage operations” — sealing off whole villages to check cars and trucks for, say, pilfered pears.

The stolen goods are mainly for resale: The food ends up in small roving street markets and the metal goes to scrap dealers. Last year alone more than 20,000 thefts were reported at Spanish farms. The Interior Ministry says it has no comparative figures from other years, or for so far in 2012. But authorities and farm groups blame the thefts on Spain’s economic crisis and say they are a big enough problem for the patrols, which began last season, to stay in force this year.

Here in Sant Climent, a village of 4,000 just outside Barcelona in the northeastern Catalonia region, the loot this time of year is cherries — dark red, shiny and sweet — dangling like ornaments from stubby trees in orchards rising up the slopes of a river valley. They’re everywhere, with people selling them from their front doorsteps and on stands inside bars for (euro) 8 ($894) a kilo. A drawing of a cherry adorns the mayor’s business card.

What is happening is hardly an invasion of starving unemployed people gorging themselves on cherries and trudging back into town with red-stain criminal evidence all over them. Nor is Spain’s agricultural sector, which accounts for about three per cent of GDP, in jeopardy. But the theft reflects a real problem for Spain’s farmers and is a reflection of how harsh times are making ordinary people turn to crime.

“This has emerged because of social alarm. Because of the crisis, crime is up,” said the local police chief, Ernesto Banos. “And when cherry season comes around, people say, ‘what now, cherries? OK, let’s go get them.”

The usual suspects can be surprising, or not. “Retirees, unemployed people, young people,” said Banos.

Sure, at some point we’ve all climbed a fence and stolen a neighbor’s apple. And in Spain, theft from farms — an unguarded field is an easy target — has always been around to some degree.

“But the increase that has taken place since the crisis started a few years ago has been spectactular,” said Estrella Larrazabal, spokeswoman for a farm association called Asaja. “Thieves take anything they can get their hands on.”

And things have happened in the Spanish countryside that make it look like the Wild West, or in some cases, Wall Street.

Carrion says he knows of cases where gangs have stolen up to 5,000 kilos of oranges in one go. They act in broad daylight, picking the fruit under the thick cover of leafy groves, packing them in crates and loading them in trucks. Non-tree crops require a bit more stealth. “At night, they act when the moon is full. It is bright. They sneak in and steal your artichokes,” Carrion said.