Landrace Cannabis

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Botany

A local man inspects tall landrace cannabis plants in Pulgi, Grahan Valley, Himachal Pradesh

Cannabis botany·Glossary

Taxonomy & Classification

Cannabis sativa·Cannabaceae·Cannabis taxonomy·Sativa vs Indica·NLD/BLD classification·Cannabis ruderalis·Cultivar·Cannabis strain·Landrace Cannabis·Cannabis use types·Feral and ruderal Cannabis·Phylogenetics of Cannabis

Plant Morphology

Leaf morphology·Stem morphology·Seed morphology·Achene·Root architecture·Fibre morphology

Reproductive Biology

Dioecy·Monoecy·Sex expression·Hermaphroditism·Pollination biology·Inflorescence morphology·Vegetative propagation

Life Cycle & Phenology

Photoperiod response·Autoflowering·Flowering time

Trichome Biology

Resin·Trichome types·Trichome development

Chemical Ecology

Secondary metabolites·Chemotype·Terpene profiling

Ecology

Cannabis ecology·Herbivory and defence·Pathogens and disease

Environmental Adaptation

Phenotypic plasticity·Climate adaptation in Cannabis·Abiotic stress tolerance·Epigenetics in Cannabis

Population Biology

Terroir in Cannabis·Polyploidy·Centre of origin·Gene pool·Genetic diversity·Local adaptation·Natural selection·Mass selection·Genetic drift·Gene flow·Introgression·Genetic contamination·Genetic erosion

Portal·Category

Landrace cannabis is a cultivated cannabis population that has evolved over time in a specific geographic region, shaped by local environmental pressures and by the conscious or unconscious selection of farmers. Cannabis landraces are genetically diverse and locally adapted, often valued for distinctive traits such as flavour, resilience or suitability for traditional uses.

Reviews of cannabis breeding state that hemp-type and drug-type varieties were traditionally bred mainly through mass selection and that early landraces were developed by it. In mass selection farmers choose the individual plants that best show the traits they want and sow the bulked seed of those plants as the next crop. How much selection a landrace receives varies. In a review of landrace definitions across crops, A.C. Zeven judged that its intensity "will have varied from nil to quite strong selection" and that "little has been recorded".^: 136 Landraces go on evolving through seed exchange and occasional introgression.^{: 132–133, 137}

Clarke and Merlin judged that the majority of traditional fibre, seed and drug landraces are no longer grown and that many of those left have been diluted by interbreeding with introduced modern cultivars.^: 317 They quote Watson and Clarke (1997), who named suppression and eradication of the plant among the causes of lost local varieties.^: 318 In Morocco, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy and Kenza Afsahi reported in 2014 that kif was being replaced across the Rif Mountains by hybrid varieties, among them khardala, a change that had started slowly in the early 2000s.

Terminology

Casañas and colleagues credit von Rümker (1908) with introducing the term landrace. Zeven traces the first reference to landraces as genetic resources to a congress at Vienna in 1890 and finds the first definition in von Rümker, who wrote of cereal varieties grown since time immemorial in the region whose name they carry.^{: 127, 129} For many years afterwards it was used for cultivars that arose with no conscious selection. The concept developed against the backdrop of early 20th-century work on the geographic origins of crop diversity, particularly the centres-of-diversity hypothesis articulated by Nikolai Vavilov, who documented the concentration of crop genetic variation in specific source regions and argued for their conservation as the genetic foundation of future agriculture.

Landraces were described as changing from early on. Mansholt wrote in 1909 that a landrace's genetic composition changes when it is grown outside its home region. Tschermak wrote in 1912 that its present composition reflects what was first introduced and later changes from cultivation methods, the environment and hybridisation.^: 129 Casañas and colleagues note that many consider landraces inalterable and state that they are in constant evolution through natural and artificial selection. They add that gene flow runs in all directions among wild plants, landraces and improved varieties. Zeven's own proposal turns on this change: an autochthonous landrace adapts continuously because the environment differs each year and because it becomes "contaminated", on purpose or not, with a few genotypes of other landraces or cultivars. Farmers add to the process by trying out new material and mixing seed to increase yield stability.^: 137

An expanded definition

Casañas and colleagues proposed an expanded definition of the landrace in 2017. They argue that landraces can incorporate modern breeding techniques as long as they stay tied to local adaptation, culture and farmer participation. Landraces, in their definition, are:

"plant materials consisting of cultivated varieties that have evolved and may continue evolving, using conventional or modern breeding techniques, in traditional or new agricultural environments within a defined ecogeographical area and under the influence of local human culture."

Other definitions keep formal breeding out. For Louette and colleagues (1997) a landrace is a farmers' variety not improved by a formal breeding programme.^: 132 For Camacho Villa and colleagues (2005) it is a dynamic population that "lacks formal crop improvement". Casañas and colleagues answer that such limits would turn landraces into "museum relics". They find it hard to argue that cultivars obtained from landraces by directed crossing or selfing followed by selection are not landraces. Zeven concluded that a landrace is too complex for an all-embracing definition.^: 137

Characteristics

Zeven's review gathers definitions written over some 90 years.^: 129 In 2005 Camacho Villa and colleagues drew on a literature review, a workshop and interviews with informants to propose a working definition: "a dynamic population(s) of a cultivated plant that has historical origin, distinct identity and lacks formal crop improvement, as well as often being genetically diverse, locally adapted and associated with traditional farming systems". They found these features common but not always all present in one landrace. The exceptions turn on whether a crop is propagated sexually or asexually, whether it selfs or crosses, how long formal improvement has run, whether seed is selected or taken at random, and what the crop is used for. Negri (2007), writing of seed-propagated crops, also ties a landrace to the "traditional uses, knowledge, habits, dialects, and celebrations" of those who developed it and still grow it.^{: PDF p. 270} Cannabis landraces are of that kind: seed is their only propagule, whereas sinsemilla cultivars are reproduced by cuttings.^{: 298, 300}

Jack Harlan's 1975 description, which Zeven reproduces at length, starts from the mixture. Each landrace is a mixture of genotypes, all reasonably well adapted to the region but differing in finer adaptations and in their reactions to disease and pests. That variation is "far from random". He also credited landraces with "a certain genetic integrity": they can be recognised in the field and farmers name them, understanding one to differ from another in adaptation to soil, sowing time, maturity, height, nutritive value and use.^: 130 A.H.D. Brown (1978) called them conspicuously diverse both between populations and within them.^: 130 One cannabis landrace may serve several uses: traditional Nepalese landraces are grown for drugs, fibre and seed.^: 298

A landrace belongs to a place without being sealed off in it. Zeven wrote that landraces are commonly considered endemic to a region, yet "have always been moved over short or even long distances". A newcomer may disappear, may replace the landrace already there or, more likely, may form a new landrace together with it.^: 128 In outbreeding crops especially, landraces that meet can give rise to an "explosion of new genotypes and phenotypes".^: 135 Clarke and Merlin's account of cannabis has both sides. Farmers in regions cut off by geography selected and kept landraces they describe as genetically unique.^: 310 Many landraces also began as introductions: a few seeds carried into a region with no cannabis gave small populations that evolved into local landraces, and narrow-leaflet drug landraces from southern Asia were taken repeatedly into new regions.^{: 297, 307–308}

Several accounts pair adaptation with yield. Mansholt wrote in 1909 of stable characteristics and a great capacity to resist adverse influences, set against less production than cultivars.^: 129 Harlan described landraces adapted to low soil fertility and "rather low yielding but dependable".^: 130 Across crops, the main characteristics in Zeven's account are high yield stability and a moderate yield level, in low-input systems.^{: 128, 136–137} In cannabis the adaptation shows when seed is moved. Colombian and Thai seed sown at temperate latitudes rarely flowered before autumn cold killed the plants, while varieties from northern Mexico and Jamaica often ripened in time.^: 308 Many narrow-leaflet landraces from humid regions evolved resistance to fungal infection. The Afghan broad-leaflet founders of modern hybrids, adapted to arid conditions, had little of it.^: 297

Formal breeding is where the definitions part. Brown held that landraces differ from the cultivars of modern scientific plant breeding in not having been deliberately and intensively selected down to a predetermined level of heterogeneity.^: 130–131 In a glossary edited by Friis-Hansen and Sthapit they are farmers' varieties with local names, untouched by formal, private or NGO breeding programmes. A modern cultivar kept by farmers over time can come to be one, especially where they save their own seed and select.^: 199 How far formal breeding disqualifies a population is taken up under An expanded definition.

Mass selection

A flowering landrace population, with plants of different heights and shapes growing side by side.

In mass selection a grower judges plants in the field before harvest, keeps the best and sows their seed the next season. A female chosen this way has usually been fertilised by many males that nobody chose, so most of her offspring are half siblings. Cannabis outcrosses, so selection is more efficient when the grower picks out superior males before they shed pollen, destroys those that fall short and collects seed only from chosen females. Farmers favour homozygosity in the traits they select for, while natural selection for health and vigour favours heterozygosity in the rest.^: 304–305

Sources differ on how much of a landrace's character comes from human selection. Several early definitions collected by Zeven left it out or kept it small: Fruwirth and Roemer (1921) described landraces adapted over many generations "without conscious selection" and Banga (1944) wrote of a population developed "without or with only little mass selection". Prospéri and colleagues (1994) went the other way, defining a landrace by the "more or less directed mass selection" a grower carries out over several generations.^{: 129–130, 132} Zeven's own position pulls in two directions. He separated landraces from cultivars on the ground that "no, or only limited, human selection is carried out to maintain a landrace".^: 129 He also wrote that Banga was wrong, pointing to Hawkes's examples of conscious selection of traits in individual plants. He concluded that human selection, conscious and unconscious, "has had a great influence on the development of landraces", though nature may often counteract it.^: 136–137 The definition he judged the best, Mansholt's as amended, turns on tolerance of stress, yield stability and low inputs.^: 137

For cannabis, Clarke and Merlin hold that landraces are not simply products of human choice, since natural selection acts on them constantly, but that cultivation favours human selection over natural selection.^: 295 Chouvy and Afsahi describe a landrace as having developed "largely by natural processes". In the Tai'an district of Shandong, Clarke reported in 1995 that farmers sowed saved seed of the local hemp landrace each year with no intentional selection, except possibly for large seed. Broad-leaflet landraces have generally not been selected for cannabinoid ratio.^: 301

The way a crop is harvested affects what can be chosen. Plants taken one at a time can be looked over and attractive ones put aside for the next cycle. Attractive plants in a crop harvested in bulk are less likely to be seen unless they are marked beforehand.^: 134–135

A landrace is a population of differing plants. Cannabis reproduces by outcrossing. Natural populations and breeds made by mass selection are usually combinations of highly heterozygous genotypes sharing a common gene pool. Landraces formed this way vary widely in form and chemistry, while clones multiplied by cuttings from superior plants are more uniform. Across crops, Zeven ties a landrace's yield stability to this mixture: whatever stress a season brings, one or more genotypes in the population will yield satisfactorily.^: 128 Selection does not by itself preserve the mixture. Breeders use selection of this kind to make lines more uniform and more homozygous.^: 305

In cannabis, other growing practices also bear on which plants breed. From the early 1970s gardeners grew sinsemilla by removing every male plant from their fields, leaving the females unfertilised and so seedless. Seed of known parentage came when growers collected pollen from a few chosen males and used it on a few female branches, the start of the intentional breeding of hybrid drug cannabis.^: 308 Resin collection can limit choice too. Afghan sieved hashish was gathered from whole populations, so single plants were seldom picked out for potency, though selection still favoured bigger inflorescences and more resin glands. Traditional narrow-leaflet farmers in places such as India and Colombia sampled individual plants and sowed seed from the most flavourful and potent.^: 302 In some traditional charas-producing regions, growers reserve seed from plants whose females have been hand-rubbed during the preceding season, applying selection toward resin yield.

Autochthonous and allochthonous landraces

Zeven defined an autochthonous landrace as one grown for a long period in the farming system concerned. His allochthonous landrace is an autochthonous landrace of a foreign region recently introduced into the region concerned.^: 137 Maxted and colleagues define an allochthonous landrace as an introduced crop that is locally adapted. Many such landraces, they note, were introduced a significant time ago.^{: PDF pp. 270–271}

Zeven also proposed a narrower definition tied to productivity, amended from Mansholt (1909):

"an autochthonous landrace is a variety with a high capacity to tolerate biotic and abiotic stress, resulting in a high yield stability and an intermediate yield level under a low input agricultural system."

When does a landrace stop being a landrace?

If the definition of a landrace is broadly agreed upon, the threshold at which a population ceases to qualify as one is not. Several processes can erode or dissolve landrace status:

• Genetic displacement: introduced hybrids or cultivars cross-pollinate with or outright replace a local population. In Morocco, Chouvy and Afsahi found kif quickly receding in 2013 as hybrids with far higher resin yields took its place. Cultivators had begun to call it beldiya (from the Arabic bled: country, countryside, local), maghribiya (Moroccan), aadiya (regular) or kdima dyalna (our old one), where naanaa (mint) and aachba (stem, stalk) had been the usual names. The authors took these new names as making the decline plain. Some hybrids carry names stressing their foreign origin, such as romiya (from Romans, the foreigner).
• Formal breeding: definitions differ on whether bred material stays a landrace. Where formal improvement is excluded, systematic pedigree selection, controlled crosses or backcrossing yield a cultivar or breeding line derived from a landrace. Dennis (1987) called the result of pure-line selection within a local rice variety a locally improved variety.^: 133 Casañas and colleagues hold that such material can still be a landrace. Zeven also reports the reverse path: a bred variety grown for generations without maintenance breeding mixes with local material and can develop into a landrace, which Bellon and Brush (1994) called a creole cultivar.^: 133
• Loss of farmer management: Teshome and colleagues (1997) wrote that landraces may not exist in their present ecological dynamics without farmers' manipulations. Zeven thought their claim of mutual dependence somewhat exaggerated, since a farmer may easily switch from one landrace to another.^{: 132, 136–137} Some formerly home-grown varieties that now grow wild are difficult to distinguish from truly wild plants.^: 131 Clarke and Merlin describe the opposite direction in cannabis, in which selection of this kind turns local feral populations into landraces.^: 305
• Bottlenecking through small samples: a population cut to a few seeds or plants loses variation. Limited seed lots carried into new areas produced strong founder effects in cannabis crops.^: 297 Landrace seed is usually collected in small numbers by travellers.^: 321–322 In storage, alleles decline through genetic drift when regeneration is badly handled.

Landraces, cultivars and hybrids

A plant grown from landrace seed outside its region of origin. Expression of traits such as resin chemistry, flowering time and morphology can shift under altered conditions.

In cannabis nomenclature, these three terms are often confused or used interchangeably, though they describe different genetic categories.

Landraces are populations that have evolved through natural and human selection in specific geographic regions over extended periods, with genetic diversity and local adaptation. They go on evolving, in contrast with cultivars maintained true to type.

Cultivars (cultivated varieties) are plants intentionally selected and bred for specific, uniform traits through formal breeding programmes. Modern cannabis cultivars are typically stabilised through pedigree selection and controlled crosses to express consistent characteristics across generations.

Hybrids result from intentional crosses between distinct parental lines, whether between different landraces, between cultivars or between landraces and cultivars. First-generation hybrids (F1) often exhibit hybrid vigour but subsequent generations may show significant phenotypic variation as the parental genetics segregate.

A distinction relevant to conservation is between a landrace grown in its region of origin and the same genetic material grown elsewhere. The underlying genotype does not change when seeds are moved, but expression of traits such as resin chemistry, flowering time and morphology can shift substantially under different environmental conditions. Such variation is the domain of phenotypic plasticity and terroir rather than a change in genetic identity. The population itself can also change. Mansholt wrote in 1909 that a landrace changes when grown in another area, while von Rümker held that it keeps its original characters.^{: 129, 135} In Zeven's classification an introduced landrace often becomes contaminated with local material and, depending on the generations grown and how often seed is changed, may become autochthonous.^: 137 A landrace kept outside its region may be termed an heirloom or preserved line. Casañas and colleagues keep "heirloom" in its strictest sense for landraces whose evolution has been suspended by conservative selection.

Conservation

Main article: Landrace conservation

Landraces were and still are grown by farmers and by market and private gardeners across the world. Depending on a crop's economic importance, on breeding effort and on the introduction of exotic cultivars, they give way sooner or later to cultivars bred for high yield under improved cultivation methods.^: 128 For Casañas and colleagues the main reason for genetic erosion is the inability of unimproved landraces to compete with improved varieties.

Across crops, Camacho Villa and colleagues hold that traditional varieties carry the bulk of the genetic diversity in domesticated species and that the primary threat to them is replacement by modern, uniform varieties. Maxted, Magos Brehm and Kell list that replacement among the main contributors to genetic erosion, with shifts in farming practice and land use, seed certification that shuts out unregistered varieties, subsidies for uniform varieties, rural migration and the failure to pass landraces and their knowledge to the next generation. Once a landrace is replaced, its diversity is unavailable to breeders unless it is held ex situ.^{: PDF pp. 272–273} They expect continued cultivation to stay of direct importance to food and livelihood security, above all for the poorest people in rural and marginal areas.^: 4

In 1927 the International Agricultural Congress at Rome, organised by the International Agricultural Institute (the predecessor of the FAO), discussed the conservation of landraces at length. It recommended that participants organise conservation in their own countries, growing landraces on farms and in school plots. A start was made only in Austria, where the organisation broke down after a few years.^: 127

Cannabis-specific conservation challenges

Cannabis landraces face a distinct set of pressures that most food-crop landraces do not. Decades of prohibition have driven cultivation underground, disrupted intergenerational knowledge transfer and subjected traditional growing regions to repeated eradication campaigns. Clarke and Merlin report that traits of improved Western varieties appeared in nearly all populations of the Rif within ten years of seed being taken to Morocco in the 1980s.^: 316

In July 2013 Chouvy and Afsahi saw the features of hybrid varieties in dozens of fields across the Rif, in what seemed to them the vast majority, an estimate they called "only a guesstimate" based on visual observation. Very little kif could be seen. Cultivators told them that the new hybrids yield three to five times more hashish than kif. Kif, adapted to the region's dryness, was mostly rainfed, whereas the new varieties must be irrigated, which has made machine-drilled wells of 100 m common. Cultivators named about ten new varieties to the authors, with khardala the most widespread in 2013.

Traditional village landrace cannabis cultivation in mainland Southeast Asia.

In Southeast Asia, traditional cannabis cultivation in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos documented in the mid-twentieth century has been disrupted by sustained eradication campaigns. Martin's 1975 ethnobotanical survey recorded village-scale cultivation of distinct narrow-leaflet drug populations across the region, with detailed local knowledge of seed selection, processing and use; how much of that material survives in situ today is unclear.

In many areas, traditional landraces face similar pressures from imported hybrid genetics. Smallholder farmers continue to maintain seed lines descended from local populations, though commercially produced hybrid seed has become available in some areas and cross-pollination is a recognised concern for the genetic integrity of these populations.

Clarke and Merlin credit traditional farmers with keeping the landraces that gave North American and European breeders their building blocks for sinsemilla cultivars and modern hybrids.^{: 308, 310} European hemp breeders likewise improved native landraces and crossed them with imports.^: 304 Clarke and Merlin also describe hybrids returning to the source: travellers gave modern seed to farmers who crossed it with their own landraces, which became contaminated and eventually displaced. They report that original narrow-leaflet landraces have become rare in Jamaica, Mexico, Morocco and Thailand.^: 324 Limited traditional hemp production in regions beyond the range of commercial cultivars still depends largely on local unimproved landraces.^: 319

Where landraces are kept

Seed kept in a bottle by a farmer at Thanalmalwila, Uva Province, Sri Lanka.

A landrace kept in the field goes on changing; a stored sample does not. In situ conservation leaves a population growing where it developed, open to natural selection and to the selection of farmers. Clarke and Merlin hold that farmers who keep local cannabis landraces preserve diversity, since sexual reproduction allows recombination, mutation and further evolution under selection.^: 317

Ex situ conservation holds samples in a gene bank or seed vault, and many landraces gone from cultivation survive there. Bellon and colleagues call such collections "frozen snapshots" of each population at the time of collection, whose alleles can decline through genetic drift. For cannabis, Clarke and Merlin warn that stored seed of a landrace not regrown every five to ten years will most likely die. They report no collection that covers the plant as a whole. The largest for hemp, at the Vavilov Institute in St Petersburg, numbered 563 accessions, of which 23 are possibly drug types. Since the late 1980s it has lost diversity and purity through small population sizes and incomplete isolation. Several collections lack full accession data, which limits their worth to breeders.^: 318

Ramirez-Villegas and colleagues call crop gene banks essential, both for conservation and for supplying breeders and other users. Methods for judging how well a collection covers wild species, they write, have limited use for cultivated plants, whose distributions also depend on people. Modelling common bean landraces across the Americas, they found Andean collections covering 78.5 per cent of the predicted geographic distribution and Mesoamerican collections 98.2 per cent. Bellon and colleagues treat field and store as complementary. Regine Andersen, writing of crops in general, calls gene banks a supplement to farmers' fields: some have eroded through electricity shortages and poor maintenance, and knowledge tied to a crop is often lost when it leaves the field. Sinsemilla breeders now grow some of the few pure landrace seed lots left to make new cultivars.^: 320

Seed law and rights

Main article: Intellectual property

Chouvy argues that a landrace cannot meet the conditions of plant variety protection or patents, since those conditions require a new variety that is distinct, uniform and stable, and a landrace is heterogeneous and inherited. He sees an appellation of origin as the one form of protection open to a landrace.^: 6–7

Andersen argued in 2010 that law and incentives across crops work against the farmers who grow landraces. In her account loans, milling, processing and marketing services reach growers of high-yielding varieties and hardly reach small-scale farmers with traditional ones. In a growing number of countries seed-marketing rules bar farmers from exchanging seed, even of traditional varieties. Her remedy is Farmers' rights, which the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture recognises and leaves to each government to carry out. India's law, her example, lets farmers save, use, exchange and sell their own seed. Calling the poorest farmers the stewards of genetic diversity, she holds that halting genetic erosion depends on those rights.

Documented growing regions on Landrace.Wiki

The following growing regions are documented on the wiki. This listing updates automatically as new region pages are created.

Growing Region	Country
Northern Afghanistan	Afghanistan
Southern Afghanistan	Afghanistan
Eastern Afghanistan	Afghanistan
North-eastern Afghanistan	Afghanistan
Central Afghanistan	Afghanistan
Hindu Kush	Afghanistan Pakistan
Malanje	Angola
North Bengal Plains	India Bangladesh
Indo-Burman Range	India Bangladesh
Eastern Himalayas	India Bhutan
Polígono da Maconha	Brazil
Southern Cambodia	Cambodia
Northern Xinjiang	China
Yunnan	China
Kham	China
Southeastern Tibet	China
Northeast China	China
Southern Xinjiang	China
Llanos Orientales	Colombia
Cordillera Oriental (Colombia)	Colombia
Northern Colombia	Colombia
Cordillera Central (Colombia)	Colombia
Sinai Peninsula	Egypt
Volta	Ghana
Brong Ahafo	Ghana
Petén	Guatemala
The Dooars	India
Malwa	India
Eastern Ghats	India
Shillong Plateau	India
Brahmaputra Valley	India
Western Terai	India
Eastern Terai	India
Western Ghats	India
Garhjat	India
Rohilkhand	India
Western Himalayas	India
North Avadh	India
Deccan	India
Nimar	India
Punjab submontane belt	India Pakistan
Karakoram	India Pakistan
North Bihar Plains	India
Northern Sumatra	Indonesia
New Guinea Highlands	Indonesia Papua New Guinea
Hokkaido	Japan
Tian Shan (growing region)	Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan
Moyynkum	Kazakhstan
Lake Victoria basin	Tanzania Kenya
Fergana Valley	Uzbekistan Tajikistan Kyrgyzstan
Southern Laos	Laos
Central Laos	Laos
Northern Laos	Laos
Maloti Mountains	Lesotho
Sierra Madre Occidental	Mexico
Northern Mongolia	Mongolia
Eastern Mongolia	Mongolia
Rif Mountains	Morocco
Kachin Hills	Myanmar
Shan Hills	Myanmar
Pegu Yoma	Myanmar
Central Myanmar	Myanmar
Terai	Nepal
Central Himalayas	Nepal
South-western Nigeria	Nigeria
Lesser Himalayas (Pakistan)	Pakistan
Kohistan (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa)	Pakistan
Potohar Plateau	Pakistan
Cordillera Central	Philippines
Transbaikal	Russia
Altai Krai (growing region)	Russia
Novosibirsk Oblast (growing region)	Russia
Southern Urals	Russia
Ishim steppe	Russia
Kurgan Oblast (growing region)	Russia
Minusinsk Basin	Russia
Krasnoyarsk Krai (growing region)	Russia
Amur basin	Russia
Casamance	Senegal
Wild Coast	South Africa
Southern Sri Lanka	Sri Lanka
Zarafshan Valley	Uzbekistan Tajikistan
Morogoro	Tanzania
Northern Thailand	Thailand
Central Thailand	Thailand
Eastern Thailand	Thailand
Northeastern Thailand	Thailand
Western Thailand	Thailand
Southern Thailand	Thailand
Black Sea Region (Turkey)	Turkey
Aegean Region (Turkey)	Turkey
Midwestern United States	United States
Northwest Vietnam	Vietnam

See Growing regions for the full interactive listing with maps and region cards.

See also

• Cannabis taxonomy
• Centre of origin
• Sativa vs Indica
• NLD/BLD classification
• Cultivar
• Hybrid
• Heirloom variety
• Mass selection
• Genetic erosion
• Landrace conservation
• Terroir in Cannabis
• In situ conservation
• Ex situ conservation