Talk:Mount Kenya forest

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Discussion for: Mount Kenya forest • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Mount Kenya forest treats the forest of Mount Kenya within Meru, Tharaka-Nithi and Embu counties as a cannabis growing area. It covers the forest's setting, the cannabis fields counted from the air in 1999 and 2002, and later reports of growing in the forest. Kenya's law on cannabis is treated at Kenya.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why the Mount Kenya forest is a growing area

• Gathaara's aerial survey for the Kenya Wildlife Service (August 1999) counted 143 cannabis fields, about 200 hectares in all, in the indigenous forest along the Ruguti and Thuchi rivers on the south-eastern slopes (pp. v, 11, 22).
• The interim report of Vanleeuwe, Woodley, Lambrechts and Gachanja (February 2003) repeated the count in 2002 over a sample of the 1999 area. It found smaller fields that had moved into the bamboo belt, and wrote that operations against them were continuing (pp. 18, 22, 27).
• The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's review of the world cannabis situation (Bulletin on Narcotics, 2006) reports raids on 14 farms around Mount Kenya in 2001 and 2002, and increased cultivation found during raids in 2004 (p. 75).
• The Nation (26 May 2024) wrote that bhang farming had long been associated with the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya.
• The National Crime Research Centre's study Mapping Cannabis Trafficking in Kenya (2024) quotes a probation officer: cannabis was grown in the Meru and Chuka forests, and most of the supply in Tharaka Nithi came from the Mount Kenya forest (p. 29).
• The Standard (22 January 2025) placed a hub of the bhang trade in the Kiamuriuki forest block at Chuka, which it described as part of the Mount Kenya forest.
• The Kenya News Agency (10 May 2025) reports the interior cabinet secretary, Kipchumba Murkomen, saying that bhang was being grown deep in the forest and that the farms affected Meru, Tharaka Nithi and Embu counties.
• The status is Active: the sources describe cultivation from 1999 to 2025. Raids and eradication do not change it, since no source says that growing has ended.

Extent and border

• No source read for this page draws a line round the growing area. The 1999 and 2002 surveys place the fields on the south-eastern slopes, along the Ruguti and Thuchi rivers and later in the bamboo belt. The 2025 statement names the three counties, and the 2024 and 2025 reports name the Chuka and Kiamuriuki forests.
• The map border is approximate. It is the Mount Kenya National Reserve, the protected forest round the mountain, as mapped in OpenStreetMap, cut to the boundaries of Meru, Tharaka-Nithi and Embu counties. It covers about 1,100 km². The infobox area is rounded from the border.
• The border leaves out the Mount Kenya National Park, which holds only small areas of the indigenous forest, and the parts of the reserve in other counties, which the sources do not name. It also leaves out the Upper and Lower Imenti forest reserves near Meru, which are mapped as separate reserves. The probation officer's "Meru forest" could not be matched to a particular reserve.
• The south-eastern slopes, where the 1999 and 2002 surveys found the fields, lie inside the border. The courses of the Ruguti and Thuchi are not named on the map data used, so the rivers themselves were not checked against it. The towns of Chuka, Chogoria, Embu and Meru lie outside it.
• The northern and north-western parts of the reserve inside Meru County fall within the border although no source read for this page reports cannabis there.

Sources

• Gathaara (1999). Read in full in the copy held by the UNEP document repository. The report gives two counts of fields, 138 in the description of the south-eastern Ocotea forest (p. 9) and 143 in the section on cannabis and its table (p. 11), and gives the area both as "some 200 hectares" and as 198.7 hectares. The page uses 143 and about 200 hectares. Field areas were estimated by eye from the aircraft (p. 7).
• Vanleeuwe and others (2003). Read in full in the same repository. The 2002 figures come from a sample of 30 squares, about 18 per cent of the area flown in 1999, and are compared with the 1999 observations for the same squares; they are not a count of the whole forest.
• UNODC (2006). The Kenya paragraph on p. 75 cites a UNODC country profile of Kenya of 2003, which was not read. The paragraph's estimate of up to 1,500 hectares covers the Lake Victoria basin, the central highlands and the coast together, so it is not used here.
• National Crime Research Centre (2024). Read in full. The quotation is from one informant interviewed for the study. The same study names Meru among its seven study counties (p. 22) and, citing surveys by the National Authority for the Campaign Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse, lists Embu among counties where cultivation has been reported (p. 19); that county-wide listing is not used here.
• The Standard (2025). Only the headline and the first two paragraphs could be read; the rest of the report is behind a paywall. The page cites it for nothing beyond those.
• Kenya News Agency (2025). Read in full.

Sources not used

• A video report of a multi-agency operation that found cannabis on more than 10 acres inside the Mount Kenya forest was seen only as a title in search results. It gives no date or county.
• A 2026 online report quoting the principal secretary for forestry on cannabis seen in Tharaka-Nithi was read but not used; no fuller account of the statement was found.