The other day a man was charged and then pleaded guilty to stealing food from The MarketPlace. There's no need to mention names because he did it simply to survive. Now, I'm not condoning that …. but he had not eaten anything for two days.And it's not the first time this year in Bermuda such a seemingly petty crime has been dealt with through the courts. Tragically, it may not be the last either if trends regarding food availability and the ‘starving of Bermuda' continue. What is happening in Bermuda in regards to available food for residents is a greater crime than the importing of fire arms. And it's hurting, if not killing people here, on a grander scale.“I can tell you food demand and as a consequence to that, food theft, are both massively on the rise,” said Rev Calvin Stone who runs the Wesley Methodist Church in Hamilton and whose church has been operating the Wesley Food Hamper Project every Wednesday afternoon for over two years. In fact, go there just after 5.30pm this afternoon and see for yourself what is happening behind the scenes to help Bermuda's starving class.“A large number of people need food desperately and the numbers coming through to receive free food every Wednesday here, has risen alarmingly in the past year alone,” Rev Cal added.Reverend Cal is Canadian and in his three years here he's seen a tremendous ‘need to feed' develop. He thought through this column people on this Island might somehow understand that this is a silent, but major problem, that's evolving quickly. He also did it because he knew the man arrested. “He's from our church and his plight is being mirrored across the Island.”With unemployment on the rise, exorbitant grocery prices, and reduced Government assistance for the needy now profoundly effecting many families on the rock, desperate vigilante measures are being taken. And it's showing up everywhere.Sheelagh Cooper, whose tireless efforts at the helm of the Coalition For The Protection of Children, not just backs up Rev Cal's words, but underlines them.“The amount of need for food by mothers has risen overwhelmingly in the past 18 months,” she stated. “More and more children are turning up at school without food and the increases in the number of people coming in to us for food, as I said, particularly mothers, is startlingly higher than a year ago. It has reached the point where it is close to being unsustainable for us to keep up with the demand and I know, that what is happening with the hungry means that we are criminalising portions of the community. This starving of Bermuda as you rightly call it, has become a major problem.”Crime for food is higher than ever before too and is on the rise further.“We have reached the stage where it's like ‘Les Miserables' the book,” claimed Rev Cal. “That story was set in 1815 in Paris and the peasant Jean Valjean had just been released from imprisonment after 19 years for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family. Valjean sleeps on the street. This makes him even angrier, hungrier and more in need of stealing to survive. Bermuda has regressed to being like that again. Wesley Church has added security measures because our door jams at the church are now regularly shaved and the locks broken as people are stealing the food.”But these institutions both created to help distribute food and who, while frightened at the dramatic increase in demand for food, also both understand the theft.“Mothers will do anything in order to feed their children,” said Ms Cooper, and it seems fathers will too.Thomas Sinclair, the Agricultural Officer for the Bda Government's Department of Conservation Services, is all too familiar with food theft.“Are you asking me if food theft is occurring in Bermuda? Absolutely yes, it always has, but here's the thing, nowadays over the past two years we have noticed an alarming increase in the amount of food being stolen,” he stated.It's, on the most part, known to the police and the government as Night Farming and on some raids, thieves are making off with whole fields of vegetables.“They bring bags in under the cover of darkness, and just steal broccoli and corn and cut pumpkins off the vine and grab all the cauliflower. It's now pretty much epidemic,” said Mr Sinclair. “But an offshoot of this theft is that because it occurs at night time, the thieves are trampling young plants and that damage is almost as harmful.”As in most cultures, when demand for something becomes extreme, as food has become here, the criminal element steps in to take advantage as well. “And I know that's happening here on a grand and growing scale,” warned Mr Sinclair. “No farmer would begrudge someone just coming in stealing a single cob of corn or a pumpkin to feed their starving family, but the organised crime boys are now taking over too. It's a result, yes, of the downturn in the economy but much of this large commercial theft is just greed and the perpetrators are making money for themselves by selling the food illegally for prices that are way lower than the stores do.”And the starving underclass in Bda, which is growing in numbers rapidly too, is turning to the organised crime gangs more and more to buy their food, if they can even afford that thus sustaining a vicious cycle of black market criminality.“Without unemployment help, people are literally starting to starve and on top of that there is a very large working class on the poverty line here too,” said Rev Cal.The recent arrests have just knocked the lid off this for all to see. And something must be done.“We have 65,000 people here made up of the haves and have nots,” explained Ms Cooper from the Coalition. “By and large it is a wealthy nation so we need the haves to help out more.”She is correct. The need for us all, both humane and Christian, should be to help and treat one another as we would ourselves.But more than that, this Island could be the global trendsetter in appeasing hunger. We have the chance to be the quintessential model with our small population, massive top-end wealth, and myriad organisations such as the Wesley Methodist Church and the Coalition, to feed the poor. It just requires a collective eye on this dire situation and our inherent need to help one another to surface.There is not just a need, but an absolute compulsion to help the starving here.“We can't just turn our backs on the crime for food here. We must all help or we will become like the days of ‘Les Miserables',” added Rev Cal.Which, given how far we have all come in other areas, would be a complete disgrace and a reversal of all the things Bermudians stand for in the eyes of the world.