CANNABIS CULTURE – How Malawi Plans to Overtake Africa’s Cannabis Pace-Setters
“Surprisingly, Malawi, a world tobacco crop darling, remained a medical cannabis backwater whilst her regional neighbors South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho moved quickly to strike deals with European and Canadian cannabis firms,” Deogracious Kalima, an ecology consultant in Blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi who has worked with FAO on sustainability in the past tells Cannabis Culture.
“Minimal paperwork on medical cannabis; onboarding startups willing to experiment; freeing up fresh land; that’s the game plan,” Wallis Banda, cannabis investors liaison manager for Malawi’s agriculture ministry, explained the game plan to Cannabis Culture.
Quick catch-up
Malawi is mastering the economics of cannabis for export and starting to grab serious from abroad, added Banda.
At the heart of Malawi’s lighting-speed catch-up is the simplicity of rules: license fees to cultivate and cannabis for export and the licenses to process medical cannabis has been pegged at US$10,000; while the license fee to grow and sell industrial hemp is around US$2,000 – with minimal paperwork required unlike in her neighboring rival countries like South Africa where licensing requires a mountain of paperwork.
“We shouldn’t have to catch up,” said Banda. “Historically Malawi was a global leader in supplying premium quality leaf tobacco, number one in the world for burley, and celebrated the world over for her frothy tea products. We slept on the wheel on medical cannabis and we won’t anymore.”
Blessed with rich tropical soils, and warm temperate climates Malawi should have aggressively hitched itself onto the medical cannabis bandwagon earlier than its quick-footed neighbors – ecology consultant Kalima adds.
“Five years ago, I would say was the time when we should have moved aggressively on medical cannabis, invited cultivators from North America and Europe, and gradually onboarded our domestic growers in win-win partnerships.”
Now her regional neighbors have moved ahead, says Kalima. South Africa licensed the cultivation of medical cannabis as far as 2018, and exported 2.25 tons of medical cannabis to North Macedonia in January, which at that time was billed as the world’s single biggest legal medical cannabis export. In Zimbabwe, a stone-throw away from Malawi too, the nation has not wasted time in hitching onto the global medical cannabis bandwagon. In 2021, Zimbabwe basked in the glory of shipping a record 30 tons of industrial hemp to Switzerland. Lesotho another regional country of Malawi has become a poster child of medical cannabis, bagging cultivators from afar as Canada and in April last year becoming the first country in Africa to be granted a license to sell medical cannabis to the lucrative EU market.
“I look at all this marvelous progress and think: this could have been Malawi,” says Aidan Nyathi, regional secretary of the Blyntre Farmers Alliance in the commercial capital Blantyre.
First harvest
Sensing the new spirit in Malawi’s embrace of medical cannabis, Lotus EcoCulture, an African cannabis startup that specializes in cultivating the product for export, especially to the EU market, has made moves in Malawi. Recently it partnered with PhytoSciences GmbH, a Europen specialist cannabis quality consultant to craft, cultivate and deliver premium medical cannabis products. 250 hectares of cultivation have already been launched in Malawi using what it calls the method of ‘cultivation and processing-as-a-service model’.
“Our first harvest in Malawi is expected before summer 2023,” Agyeiwaa Pepera, the spokesperson of Lotus tells Cannabis Culture of the new cannabis enthusiasm in Malawi.
Cultivation and processing -as-service involves the cultivation and processing of medical Cannabis and its derivatives under long-term off-taker agreements. Cultivation and processing are done to buyers’ specifications, providing them with a reliable source of world-class GMP-certified products, in quantities and at prices that are agreed upon in advance, Pepera explains to Cannabis Culture.
Not by chance
Lotus has not chosen Malawi on a whim added Pepera. Recently, “the Malawi government and Cannabis Regulatory Authority has been among the most forward-thinking and supportive of the movement to legalize cannabis for medical and industrial products,” Pepera added.
Malawi fits into the attractiveness of Africa as the ideal venue to cultivate cannabis. “With the right technical competency, research, and training, Africa is positioned to be the go-to source for cannabis production due to vast land availability, ideal climate, and cheaper production costs as compared with North American counterparts,” summed Pepera.
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