A lack of coherence between government departments means little progress has been made in developing cannabis policy
The government has made a series of “missteps” in drafting cannabis policy with the result that it will take at least another three years before President Cyril Ramaphosa’s promise of a green economy can take off.
Industry experts, including Garth Strachan, Ramaphosa’s cannabis policy head, believe the government needs to introduce interim measures to enable the industry to get off the ground while “coherent” legislation was drafted to allow the industry to operate legally in the long term.
The industry, much of which remains illicit because of the lack of a legal framework within which to operate, generates an estimated R28-billion a year, but only about 80 licences to cultivate have been issued thus far at prices far beyond what most cannabis growers can afford.
The Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill, presently before parliament, was meant to have been passed in 2019 in terms of the constitutional court order legalising cannabis possession.
However, it is still before parliament, and the current draft continues to criminalise the commercial cannabis industry and has been criticised for failing to accord the plant the same legal status as alcohol or tobacco.
Speaking at a seminar on the future of the cannabis industry last week, hosted by the Cheeba Cannabis Academy, Strachan said developing sector policy was made more difficult because of the large number of government ministries involved.
The government had “unfortunately made missteps” by failing to follow its own formulas for sector development, the first step of which was to “do the necessary research to secure an evidence base for a sector policy” before pushing ahead.
“Government didn’t do that,” Strachan said.
Instead, a licensing process had been placed in the hands of the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra), which had issued about 80 growing permits, effectively creating barriers to participation, rather than easing them.
“There are significant missteps in relation to the issuance of licences and permits, creating high regulatory barriers because of the exclusionary nature of those regulatory first steps,” Strachan said.
Strachan, who was appointed in June to oversee policy development, said a solution would be the creation of interim measures to allow the industry to operate, while the government ran a process to “secure some coherence” on the legislative and regulatory framework.
“The disparate nature of everything that is being done will not achieve the required economic outcomes to address the critical problems in South Africa of poverty, alienation and lack of access. Cannabis is a gateway to addressing that,” he said.
Strachan said what was needed was coherence across state departments and institutions and the passing of a single cannabis bill regulating all aspects of the industry – medical, recreational and industrial – while ensuring the inclusion of the country’s traditional cannabis growers.
South Africa needed to focus on cannabis processing and manufacturing, rather than just on growing, to ensure that the entire value chain was exploited to increase our share of the industry and create jobs all along the chain, Strachan said.
“We need to lower regulatory barriers. The president said in the State of the Nation [Address] that traditional growers should be central to the commercialisation of the sector.
In fact, we have done the opposite. We have created an exclusionary regulatory framework. We have done the opposite in that we have excluded the traditional grower,” Strachan said.
Ayanda Bam, co-founder of Friends of Hemp South Africa and chief executive of Zageta Solutions, said the lack of coordination between government departments was a “major stumbling block” to the industry.
A “hopeful” estimate was it would take three more years for legislation and policy to be developed due to the current situation.
“Getting a coherent bill is probably two to three years away. If we had a set of interim measures that would allow us to be able to push ahead with commercialisation and industrialisation, in anticipation of legislation, that could happen in months, enabling a transition, rather than waiting for three years for a bill,” Bam said.
He said the current regulatory framework was “absurd” and had the unintended consequences that all the permits which had been issued thus far were unlawful, while a company wanting to grow industrial hemp for making bricks would still have to secure a licence from Sahpra.
The treasury and the South African Revenue Service were also falling foul of the law by raising revenue – and Unemployment Insurance Fund contributions – from companies in the sector.
Bam said departments needed to agree on the creation of a single, coherent, all-purpose bill to allow for parallel cannabis industries and ensure the incorporation of the currently illicit industry into the legal one.
Both Bam and Strachan said the focus on regulating cultivation should be shifted towards processing, with the intended use of the plant, for medical, recreational or industrial purposes, determining how it was administered.
Cannabis attorney Paul-Michael Keichel said there was an immediate need for the government to stop treating cannabis as a law and order issue and to instead view it as a social and medical concern.
“The nitty-gritties are going to take a long time. In the meantime, we need to stop locking up people in cages and using the criminal justice system to ruin the lives of individuals and their businesses,” he said.
While cannabis clubs and shops continue to flourish in urban centres around the country, with very little police persecution despite their illegal status, growers in rural Eastern Cape continue to battle to survive in a changing cannabis market.
The majority of the growers in rural Pondoland still produce the low-potency landrace mpondo their families have been growing for hundreds of years, but the market for their crop has dwindled, due to the popularity of more potent imported strains which were introduced to the area and Swaziland in the 1990s.
A 20 litre bucket of mpondo fetches only R700 on the market, compared with R10 000 for the same quantity of “cheese” or one of the other strains being grown locally in the villages around Lusikisiki, Ntabankulu and Port St Johns.
Bantubonke Mfanekiso’s family has been growing landrace mpondo cannabis near Lusikisiki for several generations but have made the transition to growing exotic strains because of economics.
“Most of the people here are still growing mpondo but there is no money in it any more,” Mfanekiso told the Mail & Guardian during a visit to the area earlier this year. “Even growing cheese and other strains, it is still very difficult to earn money here.
“The government talks about including us in the new industry, but the permits are too expensive for us to afford, so people have to keep on growing illegally. If the municipality has a meeting to talk about cannabis, they have it in town. Nobody comes here, where we have been growing this plant for 100 years,” Mfanekiso said.
“We hear about people investing and licences but there is nothing like that for us here.”
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