Africa is not new to the cartel economy. West African cocaine seizures rose from about two tonnes in 2018 to more than 30 tonnes in 2025, as traffickers turned ports such as Dakar into redistribution hubs for Europe (Opens in new window).
What is new is production, and the logic behind it is commercial. The cartels use the P2P method (Opens in new window), which makes meth from bulk industrial chemicals rather than the tightly controlled cold-and-flu medicines older labs relied on, allowing manufacture at industrial scale – these precursor chemicals usually flow from the east. Nearly a third of South Africa’s trade is with China and India, and large legitimate trade through South Africa and Kenya makes these precursor shipments easy to hide (Opens in new window).
The money trail points east, too. In June testimony to the US Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, Brookings’ Vanda Felbab-Brown described the cartels’ use of Chinese money-laundering networks (Opens in new window). A senior officer at INTERPOL’s regional office in Harare, Zimbabwe, confirmed this pattern in a private discussion with the authors.
For Australia, this should matter for three reasons.
First, the cartels are already entrenched here. Australian police (Opens in new window) reported in 2024 that around 70% of meth seized was supplied by North American production sources, displacing Chinese networks that had supplied the market for three decades, and local bikie gangs (Opens in new window) have been linked to Sinaloa supply.
Second, a new line of production and transport from the African continent, provides suppliers with a back-up supply line, so no single route or seizure cuts the flow. Worryingly, the Indian Ocean route bypasses the Pacific corridor where Australia has concentrated its policing, arriving instead at western and southern ports and airports.
Third, the business model is hard to disrupt. Nigeria’s drug agency says (Opens in new window) Mexican operatives set up a lab, train local cooks and leave; Nigeria’s drug agency says that once the Mexicans were “flushed out”, local collaborators simply took over. Australia cannot interdict its way out of this. The labs and shipping routes sit in Africa, and shutting them down will take international cooperation at the source.
Australia can learn from the US model. US agencies worked directly with South African police on the Limpopo raid and tracked a precursor container through Durban to storage units in Midrand. Australia could do the same: an Australian Federal Police presence alongside South African counterparts, shared precursor and cargo intelligence with South African and Kenyan customs, and practical support for Mozambique, which lacks scanners and specialists.
With meth use rising in all three countries, the three governments have every incentive to cooperate. And as West Africa shows, seizures alone will not dismantle these networks; intelligence must also target the financiers and corrupt facilitators behind them. The Indian Ocean Rim Association (Opens in new window), which includes all four countries, offers a ready-made forum.
Source: www.lowyinstitute.org
