Talk:South-western Nigeria
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South-western Nigeria is the cannabis growing region of south-western Nigeria: Ondo, Edo, Ekiti and Ogun states. It covers where the sources place cannabis growing in these states, the national surveys and the NDLEA's farm figures for them, how the crop is grown, and the trade out of the region. The growing areas inside it (Ondo, Edo) carry the detail for their own forests. Nigeria's law on cannabis and the national figures are treated at Nigeria.
Data verification
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Discussion
Why south-western Nigeria is a growing region
- Carrier and Klantschnig (2016) write that cannabis cultivation in Nigeria has historically been concentrated in South-Western Nigeria and that most of the country's cannabis grows in its cocoa belt. The title follows their wording.
- The UNODC and NDLEA cannabis survey (2019 data, published 2022) chose six states in the south-west and south-central regions as those at highest risk. Its aerial survey found cannabis fields in Edo, Ekiti, Ogun and Ondo, and none in the sampled parts of Osun and Oyo (pp. 6, 10). The densest fields were on the Edo–Ondo border.
- The NDLEA's annual report for 2023 names Ondo, Edo, Delta and Ekiti as the states with the largest concentrations of plantations over two years (p. 54). Its farm tables give destroyed farmland in Ondo, Edo, Ekiti and Ogun in one or more of 2021, 2023 and 2025.
- Earlier sources point the same way: Asuni (1964) found most of the plantations of 1962 in the old Western Region, and the UN study of 1999 names Ogun and Ondo among the states where cannabis was widely grown.
Extent and border
- The border is approximate and drawn on administrative units: Ondo, Edo, Ekiti and Ogun states as mapped in OpenStreetMap, about 57,000 km², the figure in the infobox. Where the region meets its Ondo growing area it follows that area's line. The survey gives the four states 55,446 km² between them (p. 37).
- Osun and Oyo are left out: the survey found no fields in the parts of them it sampled. Lagos State is left out: the survey did not cover it, and Asuni (1964) wrote that Lagos was too urban to hold a plantation of any size.
- Delta State is left out, though the NDLEA's report for 2023 names it among the states with the largest concentrations and Nigeria's reply for 2003 put 30 per cent of cultivation there. The 2019 survey did not cover Delta, and the sources read do not place it in the south-west.
- Edo is not south-western on every reckoning: the survey places its six states in "the south-west and south-central regions" (p. 14) and captions its map of them "south-west and south-south regions" (p. 16). The region follows the survey's states and the NDLEA's farm figures, not a fixed definition of the south-west.
- The infobox point (6.92, 4.94) is the centre of the border polygon, not a farm.
Growing status
The status is Active: the NDLEA reports destroying cannabis farms in Ondo and Edo every year from 2021 to 2026. No source says that growing has stopped.
Sources
- UNODC, Nigeria Cannabis Survey (2022). Its descriptions of growing practice and trade come from interviews with NDLEA officers in the six states (2021) and from the aerial photographs of 2019. Page numbers are the printed ones.
- Carrier and Klantschnig (2016) was read in the authors' accepted manuscript; the passage on Nigeria cites the UN study of 1999 and Asuni (1964) for the cocoa belt. No page numbers are given for it, since the manuscript's pages differ from the journal's.
- NDLEA annual reports for 2021, 2023 and 2025. Read in the agency's PDFs. The table for 2021 has two rows labelled Ogun (3 and 16.4 hectares) and one labelled "Eki"; neither Ogun nor Ekiti is given a figure for 2021 here. The table for 2024 is not used for Edo, Ekiti or Ogun, because its text extraction scrambles the rows.
- Asuni (1964) was read in the UNODC web copy; the map of plantations it prints was not seen, so the page places none of the 1962 plantations in a particular state.
Sources not used
- Reports of cannabis seized on the roads or in warehouses in the four states are not used as evidence of growing.