A moral dilemma

Following my post about the mango-stealing neighbour, I discovered that there's an official term for his particular misdemeanor; it's called praedial larceny. The exact definition is "theft of agricultural produce or livestock from the land" and, though his was only small-scale badness, in several Caribbean countries it is such a big problem that they have a Praedial Larceny Prevention Act and specially appointed agricultural wardens to enforce it.

Now while I don't really understand why the mango-stealing neighbour went to such lengths to reach mangoes in someone else's garden when he had a treeful of them right outside his own front door, I am tempted to commit my own crime every time I open my bedroom curtains and see this:

I love bananas in Mauritius. They're locally grown so left to ripen on the tree, and are much smaller and sweeter than the variety we get in Europe. In our corner shop, we pay between 3-5 rupees (6-10p) per banana, so I estimate that this "régime" holds about £15 worth of fruit. I've been watching them grow for months now, since they were this size:

It's been fascinating; I never knew that bananas grew upwards on the world's tallest herb (not a tree), I didn't know that the leaves start off like the big one you see in the picture, and that they separate out into fronds as they grow, or that the purplish part under the bananas is the flower and is also edible. In La Réunion, they call it "baba-figue" and it's usually cooked and eaten in meat dishes or salads.

The thing is that these bananas are not growing in my garden, so if I were to pick them, I would be as guilty of praedial larceny as the mango thief. I originally thought they were growing in his garden, in which case I'd have picked them immediately and left half on the mango tree owner's doorstep. 

Closer investigation, however, shows a more complicated problem. In the picture above, the garden you can see the most of, on the right-hand side, is the mango tree garden, the yellow house is the mango-thief, then there's our house on the left, and another ugly concrete house behind ours. The banana plant is in the garden of the ugly concrete house, but they're actually growing diagonally over the wall into the mango tree garden. Mango tree man is elderly and rarely goes outside so he won't be picking them, mango-thief has his own banana leaves blocking his view of the booty, and I don't think ugly concrete house man can either see or access them, despite them being in his garden. That just leaves me. 

If they were growing over into our garden, Merv reckons the law would be on my side and I could go pick them (not like British law which would require me to give them back to their owner), but there's really no justification for me taking them where they are now. Except that if I don't, they may well be left on the tree to rot, which would be a real shame.

As I see it my options are:

• Sneak out after dark and help myself, but share them with friends and family to feel less guilty
• Go and introduce myself to ugly concrete house man and offer to cut the bananas down for him, hoping he'll share the spoils
• Tell the ugly concrete house man the bananas are there, just so he'll go get them and they won't go to waste
• Do nothing and tell no-one and watch over a hundred bananas rot on a tree, while I continue to pay 5 rupees a banana to the local shopkeeper

What would you do?