Talk:Herbicide spraying in South Africa
Discussion page of Herbicide spraying in South Africa
More actions
Talk
Discussion for: Herbicide spraying in South Africa • View • Links • Related changes
Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.
Page scope
Herbicide spraying in South Africa treats the police use of herbicides against rural cannabis growing in South Africa, from the hand pumps of 1980 to the end of helicopter spraying in 2016, with the American contribution, the health and legal challenges and the growers' accounts. Cannabis in South Africa more generally is on Cannabis in South Africa; the growing districts of the Wild Coast are on Mpondoland and Wild Coast.
Data verification
Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Sources and how they were read
- Kimon de Greef's three GroundUp articles (7 April, 20 April and 5 May 2016) and Lisa Nowicki's (29 July 2024) were read in full on groundup.org.za. The villagers they quote are named by pseudonyms in the articles and are not named here.
- The International Drug Policy Consortium page (19 January 2016) and the UN committee's concluding observations (E/C.12/ZAF/CO/1, paras. 68–69) were read on their sites.
Paraquat before 1990
- De Greef reports that the 1990 ban concerned the use of paraquat in aerial eradication programmes and that the police have since sprayed glyphosate. He does not say how long or how widely paraquat had been sprayed on cannabis before 1990, and the article does not either.
When the helicopters came, and who gave them
- De Greef (7 April 2016): herbicide by hand pump from 1980, helicopters by the end of the decade; a grower recalls her first spraying in 1986; the United States donated a helicopter and three spraying devices in 2004.
- Nowicki (2024): the helicopters "became part of police attempts to eradicate cannabis in the 1990s" and were donated by the United States government.
- The IDPC statement (2016) dates the glyphosate spraying of subsistence farmers from the mid-1990s and names Europe and the United States as sources of funding and technical support, without detail.
- The article gives each account with its source.
The end of the spraying
- De Greef reported in April 2016 that no spraying had been reported in the region that year; Nowicki (2024) reports that it stopped in 2016. The reason for the end is not stated in either, and the article does not give one.
Not used
- Gastrow (2003, Institute for Security Studies), cited elsewhere for joint operations with eSwatini, was not read for this page.
- The 1957 killing of five policemen in a Natal dagga raid, mentioned by de Greef as background, which concerns raids rather than spraying.