CANNABIS CULTURE – Africa’s Wildest and Most Innovative Cannabis Ideas
Plans in 2022 include rehabilitation of 100 years of toxic gold-waste soil into cannabis mega-farms, and 5000 acres billed as ‘the largest cannabis research and development cultivation site on the globe’.
As things stand now, cannabis cultivation for medical and scientific purposes has been legalized in 11 out of the continent’s 52 countries and the continent is on the threshold of what Prohibition Partners predicts to be a $7.1bn continental market by next year.
Leading the way – South Africa and Uganda.
Hemp to clean toxic ‘gold hills’
The first stop is South Africa where the government is toying with ideas of growing cannabis on mountain heaps of soil that gold mining companies have left behind in the past century. “It’s bioremediation – this is a grand plan to grow cannabis to detoxify hills of contaminated soil left behind by gold mining corporations in South Africa,” Anele Lodi, a scientist with the South Africa ministry of agriculture and fisheries says, explaining what authorities have in mind with regards to cannabis and toxic mining soils.
Heaps, artificial mountains, of contaminated soil are an omnipresent feature across Gauteng province in
South Africa, the site of the world’s largest gold find in the last century starting with a rush for gold that
drew fortune seekers from across the world to South Africa 1880s.
“The gold rush contaminated soil. Radioactive gold soil, dumped over decades by gold mining
corporations, now sit next to almost every township in Gauteng province South Africa, next to cabins
where the poorest, usually Black South Africans live” says Shamiso Mupara, a Southern Africa climate
campaigner and environmental scientist. These are the sites where South Africa’s government is toying with the idea of inviting companies to plant cannabis on an industrial scale as a way to detoxify the soil and harvest crops for commercial exploitation.
“We’ll offer leases on the land and ask the beneficiaries to produce cannabis for medicinal use here in South Africa or abroad. It’s part of a ZAR 45bn ($2.5bn) cannabis green economy that cleans contaminated gold-mining land,” explains and affirms Popo Ngwato, a spokesperson for South Africa’s agriculture and fisheries ministry, of a program whose vision authorities say they are finalizing and ready to roll out to cannabis entrepreneurs early next year.
Preliminary scientific studies are showing that hemp can potentially clean up contaminated soil ecosystems. A promising study at the University of Colorado, published in 2019, concluded that hemp could bio-remediate soil contaminated by Selenium, which is a mineral naturally occurring across the Western US and Canada but which is also a devastating environmental pollutant when produced in excess via large-scale industrial and agricultural processes.
“There are 6000 abandoned, contaminated gold soil hills across South Africa– if cannabis is grown over there, that could be a bonus for the health of communities living next to toxic gold soils. I doubt this will happen soon though. I think the South Africa government’s main motivation is a cannabis cash grab,” added Mupara, the environmental scientist.
5000 cannabis acres
Just across the pond from South Africa is Eden Pharma. This is a British cannabis corporation that now bills itself as having acquired 5000 acres – “the largest cannabis R&D cultivation site on the globe”. An airport, pharmacies, and cannabis research labs employing ‘100%’ Uganda people will be established says Eden Pharma in what it calls a “Garden of Africa” dream project that they say will accelerate Uganda’s GDP by a whopping 3%.
“I hope it’s one of those – big dream ‘cannabis projects that have been announced across Africa year after year; raising substantial investor VC money abroad in Europe or North America, grabbing glitter
headlines – yet folds quitely or with transparencies controversy in years to come,” says Deogracious Kalima, an environment expert who has worked independently with the Food and Agriculture Organization in the East Africa region.
What Uganda and Africa need is establishing domestic networks of thousands small scale cannabis farmers who adhere to quality and pairing them with wealthy Western cannabis startups that are arriving with big ideas in tow, he says.
For Yasin Kakande one of Uganda’s most known human rights activists – “they say cannabis could be to
Uganda’s economy what coffee and bananas are but when I hear of these British firms coming to cultivate
I worry – will communities be thrown off fresh land waters?”
