Pubdate: Wed, 01 Dec 2004
Source: Sunstar Zamboanga (Philippines)
Copyright: 2004 Sunstar Zamboanga.
Contact:  http://www.sunstar.com.ph/zamboanga/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2987
Author: Jun Feliciano
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

POLICE, DRUG AGENTS RAID HUGE MARIJUANA PLANTATION

POLICE and agents of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (Pdea) raided a 
huge marijuana plantation in Maguindanao over the weekend and uprooted 
about 9,000 marijuana plants worth P1.8 billion, a police report said.

People guarding the plantation in a mountain village in Tantawan, Matanog 
in Maguindanao, put up a brief resistance in an exchange of gunfire with 
the raiding team before they withdrew and scampered to different directions.

"There was a brief encounter between the raiding forces and the plantation 
guards composed of about five to 10," according to a police source reaching 
Zamboanga City.

The guards who are securing the marijuana field decided to abandon the 
place as they sensed they were heavily out-numbered by the raiding authorities.

The police report said after taking over the plantation, the operatives 
burned the whole marijuana grown plants to destroy its supposed largest 
source here in Southern Philippines.

The police recently raided yet another huge marijuana plantation in Baguio 
led by PNP Chief Edgardo Aglipay.

They destroyed marijuana field by burning all its plants, according to a 
PNP report coming from Camp Crame.

Recently, Bureau of Fisheries & Aquatic Resources (Bfar) Regional Director 
Abdulgafur Abdua, in an interview with Sun.Star Zamboanga, expressed alarm 
over a disturbing intelligence report that some unscrupulous businessmen 
might be also engaged in big-time illegal drugs smuggling using seaweeds 
crops as fronts.

Abdua feared that there could be a big possibility this report might be 
true as he observed a past seizure of a big volume of suspected illegal 
drugs found stuffed and concealed inside a large container van somewhere in 
Metro Manila pier.

He called on the authorities concerned to check on this report as of its 
veracity and to clamp it down if found to be true as it puts a bad mark to 
the name of the seaweed industry in the international market.

Western Mindanao region, including a portion of the Autonomous Region in 
Muslim Mindanao (Armm), is the number one exporter of the seaweed products 
in the country with an estimated 200,000 metric tons of its produce being 
marketed annually to highly industrialized countries abroad, like the 
United States, Japan, China and Europe, according to Abdua.
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