Mount Kenya forest

Mount Kenya forest
Mt. Kenya Forest
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Geography
Country	Kenya
Province/State	Meru County, Tharaka-Nithi, Embu
Coordinates	-0.16, 37.50
Landscape
Elevation	1,200–3,400 m
Area	1,100 km²
Terrain	The forest belt of Mount Kenya, from the lower forest edge up through the bamboo zone, cut by deep river valleys; approximately the Mount Kenya National Reserve within Meru, Tharaka-Nithi and Embu counties
Climate
Climate Type	Two rainy seasons; the south-eastern slopes, facing the winds from the Indian Ocean, are the wettest
Rainfall	900–2,300 mm
Seasons	Rains from March to June and from October to November
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Mount Kenya forest is a cannabis growing area in Kenya, in the forest that covers the slopes of Mount Kenya in Meru, Tharaka-Nithi and Embu counties. Cannabis, called bhang in Kenya, is grown there illegally inside a protected forest. An aerial survey flown for the Kenya Wildlife Service in 1999 counted 143 cannabis fields, covering about 200 hectares, along two rivers on the mountain's south-eastern slopes.^: 11 In 2025 the interior minister said that farms in the forest affected Meru, Tharaka Nithi and Embu counties.

Geography

Mount Kenya is a single volcanic mountain on the equator, about 180 km north of Nairobi. It rises to 5,199 m from a base some 120 km across, and its upper slopes are cut by deep U-shaped valleys. Forest covers most of the mountain. The indigenous forest runs from about 1,200 m to 3,400 m, with a zone of bamboo between roughly 2,400 and 3,000 m. Rain falls in two seasons, from March to June and from October to November. It ranges from about 900 mm on the northern slopes to 2,300 mm on the south-eastern slopes, which face the prevailing wind from the Indian Ocean.^: 3–4

The forest was declared a forest reserve in 1932.^: 5 In July 2000 it was made the Mount Kenya National Reserve and placed under the Kenya Wildlife Service.^: 7 The minister's statement of 2025 called it a government forest "typically reserved for wildlife and biodiversity conservation".

The 1999 aerial survey

Between February and June 1999 Gideon Gathaara of the Kenya Wildlife Service flew some 52 hours over the Mount Kenya, Imenti and Ngare Ndare forest reserves, recording the damage to the forest that could be seen from the air along set transects.^: 6–8 Cannabis was one of seven threats he counted. Every cannabis field found lay beside the Ruguti and Thuchi rivers on the south-eastern slopes, in the indigenous forest, and the fields reached more than 21 km into the reserve. Five of them stood higher up, in pure stands of bamboo. Of the 143 fields, 25 were planted and 33 partly planted; 53 were being prepared or had been burned, and the rest were old, overgrown, unplanted or of uncertain state.^: 11

The fields ranged from a quarter of a hectare to seven hectares. Some were well terraced. Some lay close to the reserve boundary, but Gathaara judged that others had been placed deep in the forest and high up to avoid detection. Growing them meant clearing the indigenous forest outright, and the survey noted that people stayed in the forest to guard the fields.^: 22 The areas were estimated by eye from the aircraft, by counting how many football pitches of half a hectare would fit into each field. Gathaara warned that the method was imprecise, and that fields hidden under the canopy could not be seen, so the figures indicate the growing but do not count all of it.^: 7

After 2000

A sample survey flown in 2002 repeated the count over 30 squares of 3 by 3 km, about 18 per cent of the area flown in 1999. In those squares the 1999 survey had found 22 fields, averaging about 1.4 hectares and all in the mixed broadleaf forest along the Ruguti and Thuchi. In 2002 there were 29, averaging 0.2 hectares and covering 5.8 hectares in all. They now stood in the bamboo belt, where stands of bamboo had died off and left open ground that was easy to clear.^{: 8–9, 18} The report's authors credited the change to enforcement by the Kenya Wildlife Service and other government bodies. They wrote that nearly all the large fields of 1999 had been abandoned, but that smaller ones had appeared deep in the bamboo.^{: 22, 27}

A review of the world cannabis situation by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, published in the Bulletin on Narcotics, reports two well-publicised raids on 14 farms around Mount Kenya in 2001 and 2002, which destroyed 461 tons of cannabis between them. During further raids in 2004, it says, the police found that cultivation had increased.^: 75

In 2024 the Nation wrote that bhang farming had long been linked with the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya. A study of cannabis trafficking published by Kenya's National Crime Research Centre in the same year quotes a probation officer, who said that cannabis was grown in the Meru and Chuka forests and that most of the supply in Tharaka Nithi came from the Mount Kenya forest. In the Meru forest, the officer added, it was planted on ground just cleared by charcoal burning, where it grows very fast.^: 29 In January 2025 The Standard called the Kiamuriuki forest block, in Chuka in Tharaka-Nithi and part of the Mount Kenya forest, a "hidden hub" of the mountain's illegal bhang trade.

In May 2025 Kipchumba Murkomen, the cabinet secretary for the interior, spoke at a security forum in Embu town. He said that bhang was being grown deep inside the forest, and the Kenya News Agency reported that the government had declared war on the cartels growing it. Security teams in the three counties, he said, had been told to work with the Kenya Forest Service to arrest the growers.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Gwassi Hills
• Kenya