Legislation aimed to kickstart the commercial recreational cannabis industry will not benefit the rural communities who have been cultivating the plant for generations.
Four years after the 2018 constitutional court judgment that has triggered the South African government’s attempts to liberalise the cannabis sector, any expected windfall appears not to have reached the traditional growing areas like Pondoland in the Eastern Cape.
Instead, drought, the Covid-19 pandemic and a shrinking market partially caused by the ruling in Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development vs Prince, which allows people to grow cannabis for their personal consumption, have left many people bereft.
The Umzimvubu Farmers Support Network has been active in terms of informing people about government plans while simultaneously lobbying the state for a more egalitarian and equitable approach to growing the cannabis sector in a way that is more inclusive of intergenerational small-scale farmers.
Chief executive Bonke Mfanekiso says the decrease in buyers has had a severe effect on people who subsist on livestock and the crops they grow while supplementing the household budget, which is heavily reliant on social welfare grants, with cannabis sales.
“I have recently been visiting your traditional Pondoland growing areas, which are inland, away from the coast and difficult to access. I have been to families and villages where, in some instances, they have not seen any buyers for two to three years,” Mfanekiso said.
According to interviews conducted in 2016, cannabis sales were estimated to bring in between R40 000 and R60 000 a year to families along the Mzimvubu and Mzintlava rivers.
Likewise, the entire value chain, which includes locals being employed for several hundred rands a day to harvest crops, is being affected.
The children in these areas have been the hardest hit, because income generated from these areas have usually been spent on things that cannot be bartered for — schools fees, clothing, books, stationery and other items for childhood development — according to Mfanekiso.
These traditional growers, whose seed and planting knowledge goes back several generations, have been planting cannabis in remote areas to avoid persecution and extortion from police when cannabis was illegal.
They are now being muscled out of the sector by newer rural neighbours who “are now growing crops closer to the roads and the towns because the laws are relaxed”, says Mfanekiso.
Tijmen Grooten, a master’s candidate at the University of Wageningen in Holland — one of the foremost agricultural universities in the world — recently completed an audit of 45 families in the Mkumbi area of Pondoland, which is north of Flagstaff.
He said there had been a rapid decline in the market for cannabis over the past eight years, with the last two being “especially troubling”.
Likewise, the price of cannabis had been declining since 2003, but had intensified in recent years — affecting the lives of thousands.
“People are literally going hungry; children cannot concentrate in school because of their hunger; some don’t have the clothes and books to go to school because they have to walk 2km up and down mountains. We are also seeing the effects of climate change in these areas with droughts, limited access to water, the death of livestock and so on. Things are bleak,” Grooten said.
Both Grooten and Mfanekiso were also critical of the government’s attempts at kickstarting the industry.
Common gripes included that information about the government’s outreach and engagement programme did not penetrate these traditional areas that have limited access to the internet, television and even radio.
Meetings were generally called in towns and villages, rather than traditional cannabis-growing areas, making it difficult for those communities to avail themselves because of the lack of transport infrastructure like roads, bridges and automated transport, which was too expensive.
Grooten also added that the state had to realise that to truly include these traditional farmers, it had to provide better infrastructure and services — like roads and bridges — to these remote areas.
“People drown on a regular basis when crossing these rivers because there are no bridges — how does the government expect these farmers to then get their crops to market?” he asked.
A holistic socioeconomic approach to cannabis cultivation was essential to inclusive growth in the sector.
Grooten also pointed to the “large knowledge gap” that existed between what
the government is proposing and promising in terms of agrarian and economic reform in the area and the reality on the ground.
“Developing the hemp and cannabis sectors, as evidenced by case studies in other countries, happens very slowly, but the South African government appears to believe this is a silver bullet with immediate economic benefits,” he said.
Mfundo Maqubela, the Eastern Cape agriculture department’s director in charge of developing the cannabis and hemp sector, said he was aware that the department’s engagement programme was not reaching the people it intended to and was actively working with the local municipalities to be more inclusive of traditional growers in remote areas.
He said the province’s approach was centred on the five main pillars of the government’s masterplan for cannabis, which included legislative change, farmer support, research and farmer development through use of new technologies, increasing the market and investment opportunities in the sector, and the training and educating of current and future farmers.
Maqubela said the province was confident that a hemp-processing plant in Magwa near Lusikisiki would be up and running by October this year. The Dohne Agricultural Institute in Stutterheim, which would focus on cannabis oil technologies, was still a few years away from opening.
He confirmed that the state would look to put out to tender a contract for the provision of seeds that would be distributed to farmers in the Eastern Cape and that the government was hoping to find a “hybrid seed” that offered good yield for both hemp production and medicinal oils and extracts.
This was a plan that may cause some concern for growers, according to Mfanekiso, who said this would lead to the use of homogenous seeds in industrial type farming that may lead to the extinction of certain “heirloom” or “land race” strains of cannabis.
That loss of variety would also affect the loss of the particular characteristics of strains, their efficacy in specific medical usages and so on.
Maqubela also said that the Eastern Cape government was keen to bring in private sector investors like paper producers Mondi and Sappi to be included in the processing side of the cannabis value chain, but that they needed to ensure that growers retained their autonomy and agency.
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