For the past couple of years, many Global South nations have sought to capitalise on the global cannabis boom, reforming their drug laws just enough to allow for domestic cultivation industries to blossom, yet maintaining usually harsh systems of criminalisation.
In late 2025, Sri Lanka’s President Dissanayake opened the country up to medical cannabis investments, and the national investment board selected seven international unnamed firms to cultivate cannabis for medical oil production. Cultivation is set to be highly controlled, with police and Special Task Force monitoring and the explicit guarantee that cultivation is “permitted solely for export, with strict assurances that the crop will be used only for pharmaceutical production and testing.” Its purpose is solely to generate “significant foreign currency inflows”, whilst assuring “no part of the plant… may enter the domestic environment”. Government forces continue to consider cannabis as a highly dangerous drug, and legislation remains unaltered to reflect this.
Across the world we’ve seen a considerable amount of cannabis policy changes to harness the financial benefits of cannabis – with varying degrees of success.
In Lesotho, the first African nation to legalise medical cannabis in 2017, the plan was to export fully finished pharmaceutical products. The Government issued multiple licences to international firms to cultivate cannabis, with many local cannabis farmers being priced out of the legal market for not having enough funds to afford the expensive cultivation licences. Small scale growers were left out of the Government’s vision for cannabis’ future. Until today, Basotho cannabis has failed to bring serious riches to the state and its people.
Zimbabwe has gone through a similar dynamic: despite medical legalisation in 2018, traditional farmers remain priced out of the legal market, as high licensing fees mean that most investors have hailed from South Africa, Namibia, USA, Switzerland and the UK.
Malawi, which legalised medical cannabis in 2020 in the hopes of transitioning away from tobacco to cannabis as the new national cash crop, has also failed to reap any serious benefits. The industry remains tiny: of the four companies awarded cannabis licences, only one is currently operational.
These patterns of cannabis industry development are not just happening in Africa. In Jamaica, traditional cultivators complained of similarly prohibitively high fees and cultivation requirements, which seemed to be built more for foreign investment attraction than transitioning illegal cultivators into legal markets.
This extractive relationship seems to happen in most places that have optimal cannabis cultivating conditions and a need for foreign investment. As explicitly stated in Sri Lanka, the priority has often been to attract as much foreign capital while doubling down on existing prohibitions for local use and trade.
A global cash crop
Meanwhile, the global cannabis industry has generated billions for companies that have taken advantage of nations’ experimentations with cannabis regulation. It makes sense that countries with cheaper labour and ideal growing conditions would seek to cash in on this burgeoning industry; the issue is that this relationship can easily become an extractive one, with one party influencing the final terms of their exchange to ensure that they extract as much profit as possible.
This set up is not new: richer (particularly Western and former colonial) nations take advantage of their established companies, existing capital, manufacturing capacity and professional lobbying outfits to shape their relationship with poorer nations that have great primary resources and environmental conditions, yet lack technical know-how or resilient governance. From oil extraction in Timor-Leste by Australian companies, to tobacco cultivation in Malawi by British multinationals, this resource extractive relationship is a common feature of post-colonial economics and relations. Cannabis is merely the latest crop to feature in this age-old dynamic.
To better understand the extractive nature of these growing foreign-led cannabis industries, TalkingDrugs spoke in October 2025 with Chris Duvall, a Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at The University of New Mexico and a biogeographer interested in the relationship between people and cannabis. His past research has looked at the colonial history of cannabis in Africa, exploring in detail the history of cannabis in Africa and its prohibition there shaped by punitive attitudes from African policymakers towards the plant and its effects.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Andre Gomes: We’re seeing a growing number of Global South countries changing their laws to export cannabis for medical and industrial purposes, but little changes in domestic laws. What’s your take or analysis on this phenomenon?
Chris Duvall: An important concept in African studies is this idea of neocolonialism. And that goes back to the works of Kwame Nkrumah, who was the first president of Ghana. And the idea there is that you have external powers and it’s usually economic power rather than political power going into a country that’s bringing about change in policies or laws in that country that serves the interests of the external power, rather than the interest of the people. Oil companies in Nigeria are a great example of neocolonialism.
What we’re seeing in Africa at least is that kind of relationship being exercised by international companies. A lot of these are Canadian because Canada was early in its own legalisation. But increasingly, you know, we’re seeing them from other places, European countries, Israel – United States, not so much just because of the laws in the United States where it’s still federally controlled. But you know, you’re seeing situations where licenses that allow companies to grow in Zambia or whatnot are priced at a point where the international countries can easily purchase them, but essentially impossible for most locals to actually purchase and participate in.
And it’s important also to recognise that the laws really haven’t changed. It’s the policies that have changed in most cases where drug control laws historically in nearly all countries, at least for cannabis; and in Africa, these are mostly colonial legacy laws. There was always a point in those laws where licensed production was allowed and this was intended to serve pharmaceutical markets. What countries have done in the last 10-15 years is change their policies where they actually will sell licenses, whereas in the past there was never any license being sold. And so, you know, again, that’s the external money going in and saying, “we want to do something different” and the governments of those countries saying “yes, we’ll do something different without changing the laws”. So there’s still harsh drug control laws against the people in these countries. In most places, cannabis has been grown and used for centuries, so there’s these deeply rooted traditional uses that are still prohibited.
AG: Do you think that the value that the burgeoning legal cannabis industries are bringing into the country trickles down to the rest of the population, to those that have been previously involved in the illegal cannabis industry?
CD: As an outsider, I can’t say for 100% certain, but reading what’s available and understanding the structures involved, I would say that there’s not much at all that’s trickling down to people in general or specifically people still involved in the illegal industries. And the reason for that is that most countries have made it very clear that they are not growing local strains, right? They’re not buying seeds locally or they don’t need the expertise with these particular strains. There’s this kind of modern agriculture [and interest] of specific strains. Those are skilled professions, right? You can’t just be a gardener and then suddenly be able to grow cannabis on large-scale, tech-heavy agriculture.
So there’s a small handful of African people and those in other countries that are trained up to do those things. But these are not just “farmers” – people who’ve grown cannabis illegally or just grow other plants. There’s certainly managers and administrators and executives who are African, or from other countries – my knowledge is in Africa – but they’re not the ones who are owning the companies or the primary controllers of these companies. So it strikes me as likely very much a niche within these economies.
Certainly in very poor countries, any sort of new development is positive. My concern is that it’s being conducted in a way that minimises or at least makes the positive minimal for the people in those countries. They’re not hiring local expertise, they’re taking advantage of lower land costs, lower production costs, lower labour costs, things like that, rather than taking advantage of local expertise that does exist in these [cannabis-related] areas.
AG: You mentioned in one of your past papers that the current cannabis liberalisation reforms are “instances of accumulation through dispossession”. What did you mean by that?
CD: In some respects, that’s kind of an abstract way of thinking of it. A situation that comes to mind is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the national government leased out enormous drafts of land to Canadian cannabis companies, what certainly wasn’t empty land. I mean, if you can grow crops there, probably people were already growing crops there. And so somebody lost access to land, right? I don’t know who, I don’t know how many people, I don’t know what they were doing there, and maybe it was National Park land that wasn’t being farmed, which raises different issues.
[The issue is that] national governments have presented this information without explaining what’s going on. So on one level, it’s this broad scale, where somebody’s getting resources, which means somebody is not getting those resources, right? Governments are really focused on making sure that they get to participate in what’s seen as a growing and profit-generating industry. And so we have situations where people in these countries are not able to pursue the same possibilities under the laws that exist in those countries.
In some cases, when countries have opened up for external companies to introduce or initiate cannabis production, governmental officials there have been very explicit that they’re going to clamp down on other uses. And so you have this kind of blow back where countries say, “look, we’re opening up, we’re doing modern different things”, and part of that modernism is to make sure to clamp down on things that are considered not modern: existing [cannabis] use.
AG: When you look towards the future, do you expect that cannabis industries will develop similarly to other cash crop industries, growing in an unequal or extractive way?
CD: Maybe a few years ago I would have said I think there’s a really good possibility to build equitable industries and make it something different globally because it was very new. But I really question whether that possibility now exists.
And I think the reason is that the powerful countries globally have not really done anything to change the formal structures [around cannabis control]. The United States is the most prominent example [where cannabis remains federally illegal but contains massive legal cannabis capital].
And so we’re still in a situation where those with capital are able to invest and make more money, but also to shape policies in different parts of the world. So again, here in the US, who is making money off of these things? It’s increasingly people who already have capital, whether it’s famous musicians, athletes, former sheriffs, or hidden people. I’m sure that there’s a whole lot of Presidents, finance ministers, and justice ministers who are not swayed by the possibility of making some money for their country, if not for themselves, through interacting and engaging with a structure of economic wealth generation that already exists.
What I think would really be beneficial was if there was some level of decriminalisation, if not legalisation, so that people, just regular people, are no longer getting in trouble for doing things that in some wealthy countries, and elsewhere, people can do. You still have people in some countries who are doing hard prison time for things that are 100% legal in many countries. And so I think that even if there isn’t a different economic structure that’s established for cannabis, hopefully there will be a legal structure that’s more equitable and and more just for people around the world.
AG: How can nations then build some cannabis industry models that escape these neocolonial relationships of resource extraction, or at least reduce the harms it’s creating?
CD: I’m not an expert on economic development. So I may say here things that might be disproven or just be theoretical. But if you want to sell a license to a foreign country, make it so that that foreign company has to also buy a license for a locally owned, locally operated business. There’s a lot of possible loopholes and issues with that, [but you can] make it so that there’s tiered pricing somehow tied to an individual’s income level.
[We could have] a really deliberative national discussion of how we do [cannabis regulation] in a way that truly benefits the people in our country and opens opportunities for [us] that doesn’t just create a new extractive industry. Does that mean completely shutting out foreign companies? Possibly. To me, it seems like that’s a source of capital that would be very difficult for governments and individuals to ignore. But there could be a more deliberative discussion and honest decision-making like Uruguay. That was deliberative. It wasn’t necessarily a national referendum or anything like that, but “let’s think about the costs and benefits here and see what we could do that’s in our interest”. I know that in Ghana they’ve discussed that a little bit, but I believe they had political changes with elections that kind of derailed that. There’s been politicians in Nigeria, Kenya or Tanzania, I believe, who have tried to initiate those discussions.
