Herbicide spraying in South Africa

Herbicide spraying in South Africa was the destruction of dagga (cannabis) fields in rural South Africa by the police with herbicides, first from hand pumps in 1980 and then from helicopters. Among the districts sprayed were those of the former Transkei. After a civil-society campaign in the former province of Natal, the government banned paraquat from its aerial eradication programmes in 1990; the police sprayed glyphosate from then on. In 2004 the United States government gave the police air wing a helicopter and three aerial spraying devices. In Mpondoland, on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape, the spraying went on until 2016. In 2018 a United Nations committee recommended that South Africa suspend it. The campaign is one of several described at Herbicide spraying of cannabis.

The growing districts

In a valley village of 32 huts near Lusikisiki in Mpondoland, reachable only on foot or horseback, residents told GroundUp in March 2016 that they kept watch for the helicopters from January. For nearly three decades their plantations had been sprayed towards the end of summer, just before the harvest. One grower said that the spray drifted into their homes, made people ill, killed their maize and sickened the animals that ate the plants. A grower near Port St Johns told the journalist Kimon de Greef that her fields were first sprayed in 1986, when her village lay within the Transkei. Before that the police had cut the plants and burned them with petrol. Word of the cutters' coming had let the growers harvest part of the crop first. In March 2014 a police helicopter sprayed her while she was harvesting in a valley outside Port St Johns, leaving her skin burning and marked and her sinuses damaged; an older man said he had been sprayed across his back and shoulders. Campaigners filmed a farmer from another village who said that pilots had sprayed him in 2015 after he raised his arms in surrender.

De Greef found the villagers' cannabis cheap, with small buds full of seed; an industry source called the crop "ditch weed" sold in townships and at taxi ranks, none of it exported. He wrote that police reports cited seizures of high-grade cannabis, grown by producers with capital and skills, to justify spraying the rural growers. The police reported spraying about 1,754 hectares in 2007–08 under their Cannabis Eradication Program.

Methods and herbicides

The herbicide of the later programme was a glyphosate formulation sold as Kilo Max, which the police maintained posed no threat to the health of people, animals or the environment. Its label told users preparing it to wear elbow-length gloves, eye protection, waterproof clothing and impervious footwear, and to wash at once after contact with the skin. A toxicologist, Ockie Fourie, told de Greef that he had consulted for the police from about 1995 to 1998 in monitoring the glyphosate programme and that in practice it had had no harmful effect on health or the environment. Glyphosate followed a ban on paraquat: in 1990 a coalition of civil-society organisations in Natal persuaded the government to bar paraquat from its aerial eradication programmes, a decision approved by the Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok. In 1995 the same coalition sought an interdict against the police use of glyphosate, which it called "highly toxic to humans", but failed to stop the spraying.

Cannabis has been illegal in South Africa since 1929, and by 2016 the state had run regular eradication programmes for more than 60 years. At first police squads walked into the villages, pulled up the plants by hand and burned them. In 1980 the police turned to herbicides, applied with hand-held pumps; a police major-general, C. F. Zietsman, told reporters at the time that one policeman could now "do the work of 78". By the end of the decade helicopters had replaced the ground patrols, reaching far more fields and clearing a field in minutes.

American support

In 2004 the United States government donated a helicopter and three aerial spraying devices to the South African Police Service Air Wing, worth more than R1.6 million in 2016 terms. The United States ambassador told News24 that it was "in the US interest" to help fight the drug trade. A statement on cannabis eradication in South Africa published by the International Drug Policy Consortium in January 2016 said that funding and technical support for the spraying came from Europe and the United States. It dated the glyphosate spraying of subsistence farmers from the mid-1990s. GroundUp reported in 2024 that the helicopters, which it dated to police eradication in the 1990s, had been donated by the United States government and sprayed the fields with glyphosate twice a year; de Greef dates the American gift to 2004.

Challenge and end

In March 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen. In January 2016 the environmental lawyer Ricky Stone, acting for the cannabis campaign Fields of Green for All, the Transkei Animal Welfare Initiative, the Amapondo Children's Project and affected villagers, asked the police to suspend the spraying at once, pending an independent review of its "effectiveness, appropriateness, and compliance" with South African and international rules. The police refused. They held that the spraying was lawful because glyphosate was registered under the Fertilisers, Farm Feeds, Agricultural Remedies and Stock Remedies Act of 1947. They declined to give the public notice of operations that the national standards for aerial spraying required, arguing that it would undermine their operations and endanger their pilots. They relied on a report by Gerhard Verdoorn of the Griffon Poison Information Centre, which found "technically zero" chance of harm. De Greef reported Verdoorn's ties to the crop-protection industry. Leslie London, a professor of public health at the University of Cape Town, called the report poor science.

By April 2016 no spraying had been reported in the region that year; one grower said that it was the first time in more than two decades that her village had not been sprayed by mid-March. GroundUp reported in 2024 that the spraying stopped in 2016. In October 2018 the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recorded its concern at the use of glyphosate in the aerial spraying of cannabis in the Pondoland region. It recommended that South Africa suspend the spraying and offer the communities alternative development programmes, including a way into the medical cannabis market through licences for small-scale community farmers.

Map

Eradication event locations

Timeline

	Date	Category	Event	Province	Locality
News:2014-03-01/Eradication/police-helicopter-sprays-herbicide-on-a-dagga-grower-harvesting-in-a-valley-outside-port-st-johns	1 March 2014	Eradication	Police helicopter sprays herbicide on a dagga grower harvesting in a valley outside Port St Johns	Eastern Cape	Port St Johns

See also

• Cannabis in South Africa
• Herbicide spraying of cannabis
• Mpondoland
• South Africa
• United States and cannabis eradication abroad
• Wild Coast