Illicit livelihoods: drug crops and development in Africa

Abstract

This article assesses the impact of drugs on agricultural production, trade and livelihoods more broadly by focusing on cannabis and khat in Lesotho, Nigeria and Kenya. It actively engages with research that has recently begun to explore the links between drugs and development in Africa and challenges some of its key assumptions. It argues that based on the available empirical evidence, the causalities between drugs and underdevelopment are not apparent. It proposes a more nuanced understanding of the impact of cannabis and khat, showing how they have provided farmers and entrepreneurs with opportunities not readily available in difficult economic environments.

Beyond prohibition: responses to illicit drugs in West Africa in an evolving policy context

“…The tropical climate of the region provides a suitable habitat for the cannabis plant. The production of large commercial quantities has been documented in Nigeria and Ghana (Carrier and Klantschnig, 2016;Bernstein, 1999). Cannabis production and trafficking is a major target of counter-narcotic operations in West Africa, involving seizures, arrests and eradication of plantations.…”

A brief agricultural history of cannabis in Africa, from prehistory to canna-colony

“…Independent African countries maintained colonial-era anti-cannabis laws in order to comply with international agreements, and because many elites disapproved of the drug (Carrier and Klantschnig, 2018). In the 1980s, cannabis production increased continentwide, in correlation with economic crises; production has since grown consistently, although not uniformly between countries (Perez and Laniel, 2004;Carrier and Klantschnig, 2016;Chouvy and Afsahi, 2014;Destrebecq, 2007). Africa has been an active front in the global War on Drugs since the 1990s (Carrier and Klantschnig, 2012;Ellis, 2009), but national governments have shown varying levels of tolerance toward cannabis (Carrier and Klantschnig, 2018).…”

“…Modified from Duvall (2019). 21 Many scholars have described black-market cannabis farming in several countries (Kepe, 2003;Bloomer, 2008;Afsahi and Mouna, 2014;Chouvy, 2008;Chouvy and Afsahi, 2014;Suckling, 2016;Laudati, 2014Laudati, , 2016Laniel, 2006;Perez and Laniel, 2004;Léonard, 1998;Bernstein, 1999;Allen, 1999;Labrousse and Laniel, 1999;Carrier and Klantschnig, 2016). In general, illegal agriculture has several widespread characteristics.…”

“…The crop provides income in rural communities, and to those who distribute and sell it in cities (Bloomer, 2008;Kepe, 2003;Léonard, 1998;Afsahi, 2014;Laudati, 2016). Cannabis is widely a cash crop for poor farmers where legal agriculture has become economically or ecologically untenable (Carrier and Klantschnig, 2016;Laniel, 2006;Perez and Laniel, 2004). In some countries, cannabis is a major national commodity with well-organized, if illegal, institutions of production, distribution, and marketing (Suckling, 2016;Laudati, 2014;Chouvy, 2008).…”

“…Economic arguments for cannabis liberalization have been strong in other parts of the world, and strengthened by the revenues generated since 2014 in legalized markets in several U.S. states and Canada. 4 Current cannabis economies -in Africa and elsewhere -are fraught with social inequity, political-economic violence, and environmental degradation (Buxton, 2015;Zurayk, 2013;Johnson, 2017;Pontes Fraga and Iulianelli, 2011;Laudati, 2014Laudati, , 2016Chouvy, 2008;Carrier and Klantschnig, 2016;Bloomer, 2009;Kepe, 2003). Such problems are targets of explanation in the field of political ecology, in which human-environment interactions are viewed as simultaneously natural and social events (Robbins, 2011).…”