Illicit livelihoods: drug crops and development in Africa

Abstract

This article assesses the impact of drugs on agricultural production, trade and livelihoods more broadly by focusing on cannabis and khat in Lesotho, Nigeria and Kenya. It actively engages with research that has recently begun to explore the links between drugs and development in Africa and challenges some of its key assumptions. It argues that based on the available empirical evidence, the causalities between drugs and underdevelopment are not apparent. It proposes a more nuanced understanding of the impact of cannabis and khat, showing how they have provided farmers and entrepreneurs with opportunities not readily available in difficult economic environments.

[Moyens de subsistance illégaux : les cultures illicites et le développement en Afrique.] Cet article évalue l’impact des drogues sur la production et le commerce agricole ainsi que les moyens de subsistance liés, en particulier le cannabis et le khat au Lesotho, au Nigéria et au Kenya. Il continue le travail de recherche commencé récemment sur le lien entre drogues et développement en Afrique et défie quelques unes de ses hypothèses. Il soutient que, sur la base des données empiriques disponibles, les liens de causalité entre les drogues et le sous-développement ne sont pas manifestes. Une compréhension plus nuancée de l’impact du cannabis et du khat est proposée, montrant comment ils ont fourni aux producteurs et aux entrepreneurs des opportunités pas si facilement accessibles dans des environnements économiques difficiles.

Keywords:

• drugs
• development
• cannabis
• khat

Mots-clés:

• drogues
• développement
• cannabis
• khat

Notes on contributors

Neil Carrier is Lecturer in African Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Kenyan khat: the social life of a stimulant (Leiden: Brill, 2007), as well as (with Gernot Klantschnig) Africa and the war on drugs (London: Zed Books, 2012) among other publications on the theme of drugs in Africa.

Gernot Klantschnig is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Crime at the University of York, UK. He is the author of Crime, drugs and the state in Africa: the Nigerian connection (Leiden: Brill/RoL, 2013) and co-editor (with Neil Carrier and Charles Ambler) of Drugs in Africa: histories and ethnographies of use, trade and control (New York: Palgrave, 2014).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article draws on long-term research into Africa’s drugs trade by Carrier and Klantschnig. Carrier has researched khat and other drugs historically and ethnographically (principally in Kenya and among the Somali diaspora) since 1998, and conducted further surveys and interviews on the production, trade and use of khat during a recent (2011–2013) project on Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate, a major hub for the substance. Klantschnig has conducted in-depth research into Nigeria’s licit and illicit drug trades and related policy since 2003. During fieldwork in 2005, 2007 and 2010 he gathered archival, government and market data (primarily drug prices) on Nigeria’s evolving cannabis trade and interviewed a number of cannabis entrepreneurs and control officials in Lagos and Kaduna. In addition to these sources collected during fieldwork in Kenya and Nigeria, this article is also based on a thorough reading of secondary and grey literature.

2. ‘Development’, of course, is notoriously difficult to define as it means so many things to many different people (Cowen and Shenton 1996). For the purposes of this article we focus on the role of cannabis and khat in livelihoods, and use the term in a broad sense that encompasses both poverty alleviation and the improvement of living conditions.

3. On the ‘youth bulge’, see Sommers (2011).

4. For example, see Irin News report on drug use by ex-combatants in Liberia, ‘Drug Abuse on the Rise', 10 December 2008. Accessed February 2016. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81910.

5. During Klantschnig’s fieldwork, Nigerian drug law enforcers openly admitted the temptations that bribes from drug smugglers mean for junior and also senior officers.

6. Note that we use the term ‘trader’ as an umbrella category for people involved in the transport, wholesale, retail and smuggling of cannabis and khat. The term ‘trafficker’ is used interchangeably with ‘trader’, however, the former has clear negative connotations and is often used in official and law enforcement discourse (Zaitch 2002).

7. SAPs were not always bad news for farmers, as, according to Gavin Williams, such policies sometimes raised prices for crops on local markets. But such gains were usually outweighed by the fall in export prices (Williams 1994).

8. Letter J. D. Rankine (Chief Secretary) to Provincial Commissioner of Central Province, 22/1/1948, Kenya National Archives VQ/11/4.

9. See Carrier (2007), Chapter five, for a description of conflict between Meru farmers and Somali exporters at the turn of the millennium.

10. Such questioning comes from all political directions, even from the World Bank (Keefer, Loayza, and Soares 2008).