Talk:Mount Meru

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Page scope

Mount Meru treats the slopes of Mount Meru, in Arusha Region, as a cannabis growing area: the forest on the mountain, the edge of Arusha National Park and the villages of Arumeru District where the reports place the farms. It covers the operations against cannabis there since 2016 and the trade from the area. Tanzania's law on cannabis and the national figures are treated at Tanzania.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why Mount Meru is a growing area

The Citizen (25 February 2018) calls the forested slopes of Mount Meru at Kisimiri notorious for growing cannabis, and Agence France-Presse (11 February 2018) reports eight hectares destroyed in the Meru forest reserve in one day.
Mwananchi (18 March 2017) reports growing on the land between Arusha National Park and Kisimiri Juu, and quotes the head of the park's protection unit on farms inside the park.
The DCEA destroyed 101 acres at Kisimiri Juu on 31 May 2023 (HabariLeo and Mwananchi, 1 June 2023), and Xinhua (11 June 2023) places the farms destroyed in that operation around the foot of Mount Meru.
The Citizen (13 July 2017) reports farms and seizures at Lenglong in Arumeru District, and Xinhua (26 May 2022) farms destroyed in Arumeru and Monduli districts.
The title names the mountain, which the reports name. Meru is also a county and town in Kenya, where Mount Kenya forest lies.

How the border is drawn

The line follows the former Arumeru District because no boundary of the Meru forest reserve is mapped. Every village the reports name falls inside it; Lenglong and Engedeko, which could not be found on the map data, are placed in Arumeru District by The Citizen.
The border is a proxy built from administrative units, not from accession points: the Arusha District Council (OpenStreetMap relation 13015762) and the Meru District Council (13015771), which together make up the former Arumeru District (relation 1243802), about 2,500 km², the figure in the infobox. The reports of 2017 to 2023 still use the name Arumeru District.
The tract the reports describe is the mountain: its forest, the edge of the national park and the villages on its slopes. Open map data has no line for the Meru forest reserve, and its outline of Arusha National Park covers only about 116 km² and leaves out the summit, so the border could not follow the mountain more closely. It also takes in the plains of the two councils, round Usa River in the east and to the north and west of the mountain.
Kisimiri Juu, Kisimiri Chini, Ngarenanyuki, Olkokola, Engalaoni and the summit fall inside the line. The city of Arusha, which is a separate council, lies outside it.
The infobox point (−3.25, 36.75) is the summit of Mount Meru, not the centre of the border polygon, which lies near Usa River.

Growing status

The status is Active: the DCEA destroyed farms at Kisimiri Juu and around the foot of the mountain in 2023, and its report for 2024 gives 131 acres destroyed in Arusha Region. No source says that growing has stopped.

Sources and conflicts

The operation of 2023. HabariLeo and Mwananchi (both 1 June 2023) report 101 acres (ekari in HabariLeo, hekari in Mwananchi) and 482 sacks destroyed at Kisimiri Juu on the night of 31 May. Xinhua (11 June 2023), citing a DCEA statement, gives 953 hectares destroyed around the foot of Mount Meru in an operation of eight days from 31 May. The DCEA statement itself was not found. The two figures may cover different spans of the operation; the article gives both, each with its source.
February 2018. The Citizen gives six acres destroyed at Engalaoni in the minister's operation; Agence France-Presse, carried by News24, gives 14 hectares (35 acres) in Arusha Region "in recent days", eight hectares of them in the Meru forest reserve on the Saturday, after six acres earlier in the week. A Xinhua report carried by The EastAfrican (8 February 2018) gives six hectares; only its opening lines could be read, so it is not cited.
Mwananchi (2017) is in Swahili. It spells the village Olikokola; the article uses the spelling of the map data, Olkokola. The reporter posed as a buyer at Kisimiri; the dealers' statements on routes and prices are not repeated beyond the market in Kenya.
DCEA annual reports for 2017, 2023 and 2024, read in the DCEA's PDFs; page numbers are the printed ones. The statement on environmental damage names the Arumeru area with three mountain ranges, for cannabis and khat farms together.
Magoti (2023) gives Arusha among the regions with reported growing and police operations "from the 1960s to 2020s" (p. 120), with no date for Arusha alone, so the area carries no year of first growing.

Not used

Mwananchi (2017) reports a local account that Germans who invested in pyrethrum growing at Kisimiri began planting cannabis there in the 1950s. It names no source for the account, so the article does not repeat it.
An Agence France-Presse report of 2001 on cannabis burned and farms destroyed on the slopes of Mount Meru could not be retrieved.
An IPP Media report of 2020 on 116 sacks seized at Kisimiri Chini could not be read; the host refused the connection.

Open questions

Whether cannabis is still grown inside Arusha National Park itself, where the park's protection unit said in 2017 that villagers had formerly planted it.