Cannabis: A rush to corporate capture?

The South African domestic market for cannabis and related products will be worth around R27 billion in three years. Will the ordinary growers benefit?
Food For Mzansi (South Africa)
Wednesday, September 30, 2020

sa mpondoland cannabis carryingFinance minister Tito Mboweni expects the newly legal cannabis industry to pour an estimated R4 billion into the government’s dwindling tax coffers while simultaneously unlocking the country’s stagnant rural economy, he said in a tweet earlier this year. But will this potential windfall benefit ordinary people? Many South Africans are excited about the opportunities presented by this new market, since the Constitutional Court decriminalised the use, possession, and cultivation of the plant for private and personal consumption in September 2018. But there is a strict and costly bureaucratic red tape preventing most people from penetrating it.