  If R-parity violation turns out to be a true aspect of Nature, a speculation
about its possible origin could add a new dimension to the supersymmetric
flavour problem. It has been shown in the past by Barbieri, Hall and their
collaborators that the small breaking parameters of an approximate non-abelian
flavour symmetry could govern the light quark and lepton masses and at the same
time could account for the near degeneracies of squarks and sleptons. A
possible connection of the above feature to the natural suppressions of
R-parity-violating couplings has been investigated here. With some
modifications of the approximate flavour symmetry, a supersymmetric theory
without R-parity has been motivated that has testable experimental signatures.
