Talk:Brong Ahafo

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Page scope

Brong Ahafo is the cannabis growing region of the former Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana, which was divided in 2019 into the Bono, Bono East and Ahafo regions. It covers where cannabis has been grown there since the 1960s and the farms reported since. Ghana's law on cannabis is treated at Ghana.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Why Brong Ahafo is a growing region

Sagoe (1966) names Brong Ahafo among the four regions from which the police had mostly reported cultivation, and his paper carries a police photograph of cannabis from a farm in the Brong Ahafo area. The UNODC review in the Bulletin on Narcotics for 2006 (p. 71) names it for the 1960s and again among the four principal growing areas of its own day.
The Drug Nexus in Africa (1999) names Brong Ahafo as one of the new growing areas into which cultivation spread from the Eastern Region (p. 22), places some of the main supply areas of high-quality cannabis in its cocoa zones, and reports a farm of 3 hectares destroyed near Wenchi (p. 23).
Since the region was divided in 2019 the sources name places in its successor regions: Mem near Atebubu in Bono East (Starr FM, 17 October 2019), Tain District in the Bono Region (Ghana News Agency, 16 December 2021) and the farms at Nsawkaw and Badu in the Bono Region sampled by Douvris et al. (2022).
No source read names a smaller tract within the region. The article gives each source at its own scale.

The title

The sources of 1966 to 2006 call the region Brong Ahafo; those since 2019 use the names of the successor regions. The page takes the older name because the growing region is drawn on the old region as a whole, which is the scale of the sources that describe it as a growing area. The successor regions keep their own titles: Bono Region, Bono East Region and Ahafo Region.

How the border is drawn

The border is a proxy drawn on the three successor regions together, the Bono Region (OpenStreetMap relation 3329833), the Bono East Region (10212839) and the Ahafo Region (10212840), not on accession points. Together they make up the former Brong Ahafo Region. The polygon covers about 40,300 km², the figure in the infobox; Graphic Online (15 February 2019) gives the old region's area as 39,557 km². The two figures were not reconciled.
The Ahafo Region is part of the border although no source read names a farm there: the sources of 1966 to 2006 speak of the old region as a whole, which included it.
On the south-east the border meets the line of Afram Plains, and in Volta Lake the line of Volta. Afram Plains is not part of this region.
The infobox point (7.70, −1.65) is the centre of the border polygon.

Growing status

The status is Active: Starr FM reports a farm destroyed near Atebubu in 2019, the Narcotics Control Commission reported growing in Tain District in 2021, and Douvris et al. sampled illegal farms in the Bono Region for a study published in 2022. No source says that growing has stopped.

Sources

Sagoe (1966) was read in the UNODC web edition, which has no page numbers. The photograph's caption gives the farm as "270 sq. yds.".
UNODC (2006) is the review "Review of the world cannabis situation", Bulletin on Narcotics vol. LVIII, published in 2008; page numbers are the printed ones. Its statement on the 1960s cites Sagoe.
The Drug Nexus in Africa (1999) was read in the UNODC PDF; page numbers are the printed ones. The suggestion that many cocoa farmers had turned to cannabis is the Observatoire géopolitique des drogues', which the study itself judged impossible to assess; the article says so. The ranking of "no seed dope" and the praise of Wenchi's marijuana come from one trader.
Starr FM (2019). The owner of the farm is not named in the article.
Ghana News Agency (2021) reports an interview with the Bono regional director of the Narcotics Control Commission; it gives no area or quantity.
Douvris et al. (2022) is in Europe PMC (PMC9612285). The study does not give the dates on which the farms were sampled.
Graphic Online (15 February 2019) is the source for the old region's area and bounds and for the division of 2019.

Not used

Léonard (1998), cited on the Ghana page for Laurent Laniel's view that Brong Ahafo was the most important region for cannabis in volume and in the number of growers (p. 96). The publisher's site was unavailable when this page was written, so the passage was not read again and is not used here.
Dovlo et al. (2026) name the Western, Brong Ahafo, Ashanti and Volta regions as the main growing regions, citing an article about cannabis in Iran. The claim is not used; UNODC (2006) is cited for the same four regions.

Open questions

Whether Tain District, or the country round Wenchi and Nsawkaw, should be treated as a growing area of its own.
Whether any source places growing in the Ahafo Region.