Casamance
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| Casamance | |
|---|---|
| ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later | |
| |
| Mangroves near Ziguinchor | |
| Location | |
| Coordinates | 12.99, -15.75 |
| Country | Senegal |
| Provinces/States | Ziguinchor Region,Sédhiou Region,Kolda Region |
| Area | 14,900 km² |
| Primary Rivers | Casamance River |
| Growing history | |
| Dated accessions | 1993 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Casamance is a cannabis growing region in southern Senegal, the part of the country that the Gambia separates from the rest.[1] A United Nations study of 1999 named the extremely fertile southern area of Casamance as Senegal's major cannabis-producing area and the strip along the Gambia's southern border up to the islands of the Karone river as the second.[2]: 23 Cannabis, locally yamba, is grown on the Karone islands, around Kafountine and in the north of Bignona department, all in Ziguinchor region.[3]: 10–11[4] Since 1982 the region has seen a separatist rebellion by the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC).[3]: 1 How much the rebels have earned from cannabis is disputed.
Geography
Ziguinchor region covers 7,339 km² in three departments, Ziguinchor, Bignona and Oussouye.[5]: 15, 22 Further east lie the departments of Bounkiling (2,864 km²), in the region of Sédhiou, and Médina Yoro Foulah, which covers 34 per cent of the region of Kolda.[6][7] Ziguinchor region borders the Gambia to the north, Guinea-Bissau to the south and the Atlantic to the west.[5]: 15
The Karone islands lie in the mouth of the Casamance River.[8] Among them the Bliss islands, in the commune of Kafountine, hold four villages: Kailo, Boune, Boko and Saloulou.[9]: 1 The mayor of Kafountine told Agence France-Presse in 2020 that the river islands were hard for the police to reach. Kouba, a village in the mangroves visited by the agency, has no road.[10] A former soldier told the agency in 2026 that the dense forest and isolation of Nord-Sindian, in the north of Bignona department near the Gambia, made it suited to illicit activity.[1] In 2015 the army commander for Ziguinchor described the area of Diondji, Elole and Badionka as a humid valley very suited to Indian hemp.[11]
Cultivation history
Before the rebellion
In 1962 the psychiatrists Henri Collomb, Moussa Diop and Henri Ayats found cannabis grown around Sédhiou, in Casamance, as a very scattered crop, a few plants to a place hidden in fields of millet or maize, usually hard to reach. The growers were often Peul or Malinké.[12]: 139 The geographer Martin Evans wrote that cannabis, which he counted with cashews among the main export crops of Casamance, was grown there before the rebellion and that its trafficking had increased with the economic depression the conflict caused.[3]: 10–11 The sociologists Benoît Tine and Victor Nfansou Diatta write that the armed forces were deployed on the Karone islands in the 1980s and a little before, destroying the fields around the villages and burning the stocks found in granaries.[9]: 4
The Karone islands and Kafountine
Evans placed the main growing areas in the north and west of Ziguinchor region, around Kafountine and the Karone Isles, where he found growing and trade well established and organised, and too lucrative for farmers to give up despite prosecution, anti-drug campaigns and incentives for other crops.[3]: 11 A Ziguinchor NGO officer told him that a family growing cannabis under contract to buyers could earn twice what it would from groundnuts.[3]: 22 Tine and Diatta write that growing on the islands became massive in the 1990s. They estimate that the four villages of the Bliss islands produce at least 67.5 tonnes of cannabis a season and the commune of Kafountine as a whole several hundred tonnes.[9]: 3
At Kouba in 2020 large plots of cannabis lay beside the rice fields. Women separated the stalks by hand and dried them on tin roofs, and the harvest was baled for traffickers who came by canoe. Villagers said a kilogram fetched 15,000 to 30,000 CFA francs, against 500 for a kilogram of onions, and one said the money paid for the children's schooling.[10] Tine and Diatta write that when a police visit is announced the islanders carry their crop into the mangroves, where the men also take refuge, and that before each operation the women of each village go to protective shrines and hold a ceremony against it.[9]: 10–11 Saloulou, they write, is the traffickers' favoured place of embarkation.[9]: 9
Northern Bignona
In March 2015 the army destroyed fields in the north of Sindian, in Bignona department, that ran "à perte de vue" (as far as the eye could see), and seized seed and between 2.5 and 3 tonnes of the drug. The commander of the fifth military zone, Colonel Cheikh Wade, said that the people of the area were tempted by Indian hemp at the expense of their traditional food and cash crops.[11] In April 2021 soldiers destroying three large fields of ripening hemp south-west of Néma Djinaré, in the commune of Djibidione, were fired on by armed men guarding the fields, according to the army; villagers accused the army of killing one of their people.[13] In January 2022 the army destroyed several hectares at Djibidione and Djilinkine and six fields in Nord-Sindian, three of them south of Kandiadiou.[14] Operations in Nord-Sindian continued in 2025 and 2026, destroying seven fields covering more than a hectare on 17 September 2026 and seven more south-east of Tandine on 17 October 2026.[4][15]
Further east, the army destroyed several hectares at Saré Koundian, in the region of Kolda near the border with Guinea, in February 2025.[16]
The crop and the rebellion
The MFDC has fought for the independence of Casamance since December 1982.[1] Evans wrote in 2003 that, since early in the rebellion, its fighters had earned revenue from cannabis by growing and trading it or by "taxing" other producers, and that the geographer Jean-Claude Marut placed the production of the northern wing, the Front Nord, around Kafountine and in Sindian district, close to the Gambia, and that of the southern wing, the Front Sud, along the border with Guinea-Bissau. Evans also reported suggestions that some soldiers grew or trafficked cannabis.[3]: 11 He judged the significance of cannabis in the war economy debatable and the rebels' revenue from it probably overstated, since it was a crop of low value with high transaction costs. In his account the label "narco-rebellion" had justified intervention and greater territorial control by the army and framed the conflict in criminal terms.[3]: 11 The UNODC review of 2006 called the importance of cannabis to the MFDC debatable and said the issue may have been exaggerated for political purposes.[17]: 71
Other accounts make the link more firmly. Wagane Faye, an officer of the Senegalese gendarmerie, wrote in a thesis of 2006 that MFDC fighters had reportedly drawn revenue from cannabis since the early 1980s and that the Gambia was the largest market.[18]: 53, 55 The geographer Chris S. Duvall, citing Faye, wrote in 2019 that a rebel group in Senegal persisted through the 1980s and 1990s because it controlled a cannabis production zone.[19]: para. 22 In 2022 Marut told a Senegalese site that MFDC fighters trafficked out of necessity, but that they were neither the only traffickers nor the main beneficiaries.[20] The journalist Ibrahima Gassama told the same site that the MFDC had always rejected the accusations, though its bases were confined to those zones.[20]
Tine and Diatta write that MFDC fighters are suspected of heavy involvement in growing and selling cannabis, but that the link between armed conflict and the crop does not wholly hold for the Karone islands, and that eradication campaigns served as a pretext to retake territory that had escaped the central government.[9]: 3, 10 A former secretary-general of the MFDC, Jean-Marie François Biagui, wrote in 2022 that the Gambia was the main outlet for the cannabis of northern Casamance, that the Karone islands grew it with no MFDC base there, and that the movement served as a convenient scapegoat in the fight against the trade.[21]
The government and the army describe the crop as the rebels' resource. In March 2026, after soldiers were killed during operations against cannabis, the Prime Minister, Ousmane Sonko, said in Ziguinchor that the main problem was the growing of hemp. In May 2026 the army's commander in the region, Colonel Cheikh Guèye, said that cannabis gave the armed bands large resources to finance their activities.[1] In 2025 the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Baptiste Tine, said that Indian hemp fed a war economy and called for the Karone islands to be opened up and their crop replaced by food crops.[22]
Military operations since 2021
Agence France-Presse reported in February 2021 that one aim of an army offensive against rebel bases was to curb the cannabis and timber trade, which the separatists were thought to control.[23] A further offensive in March 2022 targeted rebel bases along the Gambian border in Bignona department.[24] In February 2025 the army and gendarmerie destroyed several hectares of fields on the Karone islands.[8] On 11 March 2026 one soldier was killed and six wounded when a unit destroying hemp fields in the Kadialock area, near the Gambia, was attacked; on 17 March three soldiers died in an accidental explosion during operations against cannabis.[1][25] An operation near the Gambian border in early May 2026 ended with 14 arrests and the seizure of weapons and more than six tonnes of cannabis.[1]
Trade
Evans thought the largest market was probably the Gambia, reached by land and sea, with some of the crop going to the cities of northern Senegal; small amounts, he thought, might reach Europe by tourist yacht.[3]: 11 The UN study of 1999 reported Ghanaian sponsors working out of the Gambia who supplied seed and inputs to Senegalese farmers for a share of the profit, and cannabis shipped to Dakar or exported through the port.[2]: 23 In March 2026 the drug squad at Sédhiou seized 179 kilograms of the variety called verte ("green"), packed in one-kilogram bricks, which had come from Nord-Sindian; traffickers were using bicycles to carry it to Bafatá in Guinea-Bissau.[26] The customs service for Ziguinchor, Kolda and Sédhiou seized 2,126 kilograms of Indian hemp in 2024, against 489.8 kilograms in 2023.[27]
Growing Areas
No growing areas documented yet.
Accessions
| Accession ID | Name | Collected | Locality | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanden Berghen 9803 (1993) | Vanden Berghen 9803 herbarium specimen, Abéné, Basse-Casamance (1993) | Basse-Casamance, Abéné |
Vanden Berghen 9803 (1993), gathered at Abéné on 23 August 1993, is from a plant grown "pour la drogue" (for the drug) in a market garden in a hollow of the coastal dunes.[28]
Recent news
No news items are recorded for this growing region yet.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 "Sénégal: en Casamance, des rebelles affaiblis mais la paix minée par le cannabis". Dakaractu (in français). Agence France-Presse. 15 May 2026. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (March 1999). The Drug Nexus in Africa (PDF) (Report). ODCCP Studies on Drugs and Crime, Monograph series 1. Vienna: United Nations.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Evans, Martin (February 2003). Ni paix ni guerre: the political economy of low-level conflict in the Casamance (PDF) (HPG background paper). London: Humanitarian Policy Group, Overseas Development Institute.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Sénégal : 7 champs de chanvre indien détruits dans le Nord Sindian". APAnews (in français). Ziguinchor. APA. 18 September 2026. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Agence nationale de la statistique et de la démographie (September 2021). Situation économique et sociale régionale 2019 (PDF) (Report) (in français). Ziguinchor: Service régional de la statistique et de la démographie de Ziguinchor.
- ↑ Agence nationale de la statistique et de la démographie. Situation économique et sociale de la région de Sédhiou 2023/2024 (PDF) (Report) (in français). Dakar: Agence nationale de la statistique et de la démographie.
- ↑ Agence nationale de la statistique et de la démographie (December 2025). Situation économique et sociale de la région de Kolda, édition 2024 (PDF) (Report) (in français). Dakar: Agence nationale de la statistique et de la démographie.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Diallo, Abdourahmane (17 February 2025). "Sénégal : des champs de cannabis détruits dans les îles Karones". APAnews (in français). Ziguinchor. APA. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 Tine, Benoît; Diatta, Victor Nfansou (2018). "La lutte contre l'économie de la drogue en Casamance : ses contraintes et les méthodes de contournement des stratégies étatiques". International Journal of Humanities and Social Science (in français). 8.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Senegal's remote cannabis growers evade crackdown". Malay Mail. Agence France-Presse. 10 January 2020. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Aziz, Abdoul (10 March 2015). "Casamance : les miltaires détruisent des champs de « Yamba » dans la zone de Sindian". Senego (in français). Agence de presse sénégalaise. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ Collomb, Henri; Diop, Moussa; Ayats, Henri (1962). "Intoxication par le chanvre indien au Sénégal". Cahiers d'études africaines (in français). 3 (9): 139–144.
- ↑ Sodjago, Ankou (26 April 2021). "Champs de chanvre indien en Casamance : Echange de tirs entre l'armée et des assaillants". Senego (in français). Agence de presse sénégalaise. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ Diouf, Mouhamed (16 January 2022). "Casamance : Des hectares de chanvre indien découverts par l'armée, un suspect arrêté". Senego (in français). Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ "Sénégal/armée: lutte intense contre les activités illicites". APAnews (in français). Ziguinchor. APA. 19 October 2026. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ "Kolda : l'Armée détruit plusieurs hectares de champs de chanvre indien". Le Soleil (in français). Dakar. 5 February 2025. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2006). "Review of the world cannabis situation" (PDF). Bulletin on Narcotics. LVIII (1 and 2). New York: United Nations (published 2008).
- ↑ Faye, Wagane (June 2006). The Casamance Separatism: From Independence Claim to Resource Logic (MA thesis). Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School. hdl:10945/2750.
- ↑ Duvall, Chris S. (2019). "A brief agricultural history of cannabis in Africa, from prehistory to canna-colony". EchoGéo (48). doi:10.4000/echogeo.17599.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 Kandé, Cheikh Tidiane (12 April 2022). "Sénégal : quelle issue en Casamance après quarante ans de conflit ?". Senego (in français). Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ Biagui, Jean-Marie François (29 April 2022). "Voudrait-on laisser à croire qu'au nord de la Casamance il y aurait autant de bases du MFDC que de villages frontaliers ?". Senego (in français). Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ Diatta, Gaustin (26 June 2025). "Lutte contre le trafic de chanvre indien : Jean-Baptiste Tine félicite les forces de défense et appelle à une riposte multisectorielle". Le Soleil (in français). Dakar. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ "Senegal rebels face defeat as locals back army offensive". Africanews. Agence France-Presse. 12 February 2021. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (October 2022). "As Casamance rebels are weakened, is the Niokolo Koba National Park a potential fallback zone?". Risk Bulletin of Illicit Economies in West Africa. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ "Senegal soldier killed in clash during anti-cannabis operation in Casamance". Africanews. Agence France-Presse. 13 March 2026. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ "Sénégal: Saisie de 179 kg de chanvre indien à Sédhiou, un suspect interpellé". AllAfrica (in français). Sédhiou. Agence de presse sénégalaise. 17 March 2026. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ "Ziguinchor : Près de 11 milliards de faux billets interceptés par les douanes". Ndarinfo (in français). 7 January 2025. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cannabis sativa L., specimen BR0000014662546". Botanical Collections. Meise Botanic Garden. Retrieved 16 October 2026.