Cannabis Culture Article: African Governments Militarize Cannabis Production, Create Prison Grow-Ops
CANNANNEW REPORT
CANNABIS CULTURE Reports…. – Across Africa, the cannabis market has become a more and more militarized scene: from Zambia´s army foray into cultivation, Zimbabwe´s army dropping the first seeds of hemp, to South Africa and Swaziland where armies have a confrontational history with Indigenous growers. In Zambia, medical cannabis is banned for residents but in February, the army is announced it has secured 20,000 hectares of land ´freely given´ by traditional leaders to cultivate cannabis. In in February 2020, Zimbabwe's police and prison service, which are militarized organs of the state, snapped up the first licenses to grow cannabis plantations at prison sites for medicinal export use. The advantage, they said, is that prisons are already high-security zone hence this lowers the costs of producing and processing cannabis. Cultivating Bizarre Bedfellows "Armies are seeking first-mover advantage with cannabis," says says business leader Dennis Juru, president of the South Africa International Cross Border Traders Association. "Africa´s armies are key economic players though they operate from the shadows. They know the Canadians, Chinese, Americans are coming fast onto the cannabis scene." Armies cultivating, harvesting, and processing cannabis, like in Zambia, can help localize cannabis in Africa´s economies, boost local producers, and limit the growing phenomenon of ´cannabis colonialism´ says Juru, whose organization lobbies for EU-like zero-tariffs regime across the 14 countries of the southern Africa bloc. "Armies are nominally the first line of defense in a strict nationalistic sense, in this case defending national cannabis stakes," he says. Cannabis being produced by the army, for example in Mozambique, is likely to be some sort of ´nationalized cannabis´ with the export earning brought back into national coffers – unlike cannabis farmed by foreign corporations from Canada or Israel, he argues. When armies get comfortable with cannabis, soldiers and police (who have been historically used to…
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Source : Cannabis Culture Article: African Governments Militarize Cannabis Production, Create Prison Grow-Ops
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