Wee Farm
The Hohoe Police have discovered and destroyed a large cannabis cultivation at Nyive in the Afadjato South district of the Volta Region as it continues to clamp down on illegal cannabis plantation in the region.
A police team of about 62 men made up of officers from the Hohoe Divisional Command and the Regional SWAT team invaded the plantation in the early hours of Wednesday to destroy the estimated 30-acre plantation.
It is unclear who owned the farm as the farmers who were on the farm absconded and no arrests were made when the police and SWAT team invaded the farm.
The police however suspect large numbers of young people in the community may be engaged in the illegal cultivation of the prohibited herb considering the large size of the plantation.
Information gathered from the Hohoe police suggest that the plantation belongs to different individuals who have planted corn to serve as boundaries between their respective farms. It indicated that the farmers had also strategically laid pipes from a nearby stream to the farms to irrigate the cannabis farms, enabling them to produce all year round irrespective of rain pattern.
The police and SWAT team also discovered four water pumping machines, pesticides, weedicides and fertilisers in four sheds which serve as resting places for the farmers.
The Hohoe Police Divisional Commander, ACP Ayim Martin addressing the media after the invasion, disclosed that the operation forms part of the Volta Regional Police Command’s intention to clamp down on illegal cannabis cultivation in the region.
“About a month-and-a-half ago, we destroyed about a two-and-a-half-acre farm in the same area and today we are here again to destroy a greater portion of the plantation.”
We were told it is a communal farm; some farms are older than the others and they use maize to demarcate the boundaries between each of the farms. It does not belong to one person but we don’t, as of now, know the owners”, he said.
He assured that though no individual has been identified as the owner of the plantation, he would prevail on the opinion leaders in the community to help the police to apprehend the culprits.
“This is because these things [cannabis] are quick yielding, we don’t want to waste time looking for the owners of farms, we want to do the destruction first and later look for the landowners which will lead us to the owners of the farms”, he stressed.
Gibril Abdul Razak, Ho (gbabdulrazak@gmail.com)