Talk:Virunga National Park
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Virunga National Park treats Virunga National Park, in North Kivu, as a cannabis growing area: the cannabis grown in the park's forests by Bambuti villagers and by armed groups, and the operations against it. The park as a protected area, its wildlife and its conflicts are not the subject; the Democratic Republic of the Congo's law on cannabis is treated at Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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Discussion
Why Virunga National Park is a growing area
- National Geographic (Nina Strochlic, 22 March 2017) visited a Bambuti village an hour's drive from Goma whose members grow cannabis inside the park; its photo captions describe plants "he secretly grows inside Virunga National Park" and plants hidden in the park "cultivated on early morning treks".
- National Geographic (Stefan Lovgren, 29 April 2011) reports the rangers' account that land cleared for charcoal in the park was sown with cannabis, usually by the FDLR, and a patrol in the Kibumba area of the Nyamulagira sector that found many cannabis plants.
- GRID-Arendal's map of the charcoal trade in the Virunga area (Riccardo Pravettoni, 2014, from the collection The Environmental Crime Crisis) names cannabis growing among the illicit trades in the park.
- The tract is named for the park because the sources name the park. Masisi and Rutshuru, the places on the label of a seed lot from North Kivu, are not named for growing in any source read.
How the border is drawn
- The line is the boundary of the national park (OpenStreetMap relation 404784, about 7,800 km², the figure in the infobox). A second relation named for the park (12686824) covers only about 225 km² around Nyiragongo and is not used.
- The places the reports name, the forests below Nyiragongo and the Nyamulagira sector, lie in the south of the park; the line takes in the whole park, north to about 0.9° N, because no source maps the fields. Goma lies outside the line; the village visited in 2017 is outside the park, and the article does not place it more closely.
- The infobox point (−0.40, 29.50) is the centre of the park border, well to the north of the places the reports name.
Growing status
The status is Active: cannabis was reported grown in the park in 2011 and 2017. No source says that growing has stopped.
Sources
- National Geographic (2017). Read in full. The article calls its subjects Pygmies, the name by which it says the region's indigenous forest people are widely known, and the community a "Bambuti Pygmy community"; the article uses Bambuti. It does not give the full names of the people involved in the trade. The statements on arrests and killings by rangers are the village chief's, and the reply is the chief warden's; both are given.
- National Geographic (2011). Read in full. The account of clearing and sowing is the rangers' ("according to the rangers"); the statement that the FDLR had turned to growing cannabis is the article's, with the warden's "The same people are involved".
- GRID-Arendal (2014). The caption of a map in the collection The Environmental Crime Crisis; it gives no place or date for the growing.
Not used
- The Enough Project's report The Mafia in the Park (2016) lists cannabis among the resources the FDLR has exploited, without placing it in the park.
- Reports of 2022 and 2025 on rangers destroying farmers' fields inside the park (Mongabay, Radio Okapi) were seen only in search listings, which do not mention cannabis.
- The reports of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo were not read for cannabis.
Open questions
- Whether cannabis is grown in the park's central and northern sectors, which no source read describes.