Farmers are not the only individuals involved in the underworld of agriculture.
Criminality can be found at every stage of the food chain, from the top political level, through legal and illegal corporations down to the food distribution process. Agricultural crimes take almost every form, although the majority of them areclassified as white-collar crimes.
Although there are many explanations as to the causes of crimes, including
agricultural ones, economics theory suggests that crime is the result of individuals weighing the expected benefits of crimes against their expected costs. The expected costs mostly depend on the forgone legal activities, the probability of being caught, the severity of punishment, and the attitude to risk. Note that some economists have challenged the belief that real increases in the probability of detecting criminals and the severity of punishment can diminish crime rates (i.e. assumption which is the economic foundation of deterrence models). Concerning the economic implications of criminality in agriculture, it should be borne in mind that the economic costs of crimes do not only take into account the costs to the victims and their dependants, but also to the rest of the society, which includes the impact on crime perpetrators, the social costs of enforcement, the social costs of punishment, and some other crime-specific costs. Also, when considering the economics of criminality, special attention should be given to the welfare significance of the model used, or of the measure taken to combat crime.
Economics can also be used when legal remedies or legal reforms are
considered to combat crimes. In particular, property, contract and tort laws can be relevant to the specific needs of agricultural criminality. Furthermore, economics can be utilised to classify agricultural crimes in terms of who criminals and victims are and what forms of reward or injury they incur.
Climes related to fraud against the European budget, food safety, the environment, markets and economic development have been investigated in more
detail to give an idea of the breadth and diversity of agricultural criminality (note that however, those five cases do not represent all the crimes that can be found in agriculture).