On July 4 2025, Trade, Industry & Competition Minister Parks Tau told Parliament that the rollout of the National Policy on the Commercialisation of Hemp and Cannabis would be supported by aggregation schemes, dedicated hubs and indigenous-knowledge initiatives, targeting annual growth of 10% from a R14bn industry base.
DTIC did not leave the number in the speech. The target was incorporated into its annual performance planning, which means that government attached a measurable economic objective to its cannabis commercialisation programme. On the minister’s baseline, 10% means another R1.4bn in economic activity each year.
For a sector that has spent years hearing about investment, rural development, exports and job creation, that should be good news. The difficulty is that government still has not provided a clear answer to the question that matters most to existing operators, farmers and new entrants: how exactly do we participate in the market that is supposed to produce this growth?
South Africa is not short of cannabis policy. Cabinet adopted industrialisation and commercialisation as a policy direction in 2019. The National Cannabis Master Plan followed. President Cyril Ramaphosa placed cannabis and hemp within the national economic programme, while DTIC spoke of a potential formalised industry worth R28bn and between 10,000 and 25,000 jobs.
By 2023 there were proposed incentives, standards processes, interdepartmental structures and even a cannabis mini-Phakisa intended to accelerate implementation. Yet Parliament was later asking whether the Cannabis Master Plan had effectively “gone missing”.
The industry has since been left trying to make sense of a series of government figures that appear to describe different versions of the same economy.
Tau used R14bn as the baseline for the 10% growth target. Other parliamentary material referred to a current cannabis and hemp industry of R10bn. The R28bn figure continued to appear as the potential value of a formalised sector, while Parliament was subsequently told that the illicit cannabis market could be worth around R36bn.
Those figures may all measure different things. A potential formal market is not current turnover, the illicit economy is not the regulated economy, and hemp, medical cannabis and broader adult-use activity are not interchangeable markets.
That is precisely why the R14bn baseline deserves scrutiny. If government intends measuring growth against it, the industry should know what is included, which activities are excluded and what evidence will be used to demonstrate that another R1.4bn of value has actually been created. Without a transparent baseline, a percentage growth target tells us very little about whether the commercialisation programme is succeeding.
Behind the numbers sits a larger structural problem. Cannabis reform stretches across eleven departments and public entities carrying different parts of the policy, regulatory and implementation burden.
At the start of the process, that complexity was understandable. Cannabis intersects with agriculture, medicines regulation, health, justice, policing, trade, small business, science, indigenous knowledge and several other functions.
Almost eight years after the Constitutional Court’s Prince judgment, however, co-ordination cannot remain the explanation for non-delivery.
The industry has watched departments wait for other departments, standards wait for policy and policy wait for consultation, while businesses and farmers continue absorbing the cost of uncertainty.
Government has spent years describing the economy it wants; converting that policy architecture into a market that people can lawfully enter has proved much harder.
Part of the problem is the tendency to treat cannabis as a single regulatory question. It is not.
Private adult use and cultivation sit within one legal framework. Hemp is fundamentally an agricultural and industrial value chain. Medical cannabis operates through medicines legislation and specialist regulatory requirements. Broader commercial cannabis raises different questions involving production, products, market access, taxation, consumer protection and enforcement.
When every one of these issues is forced through the same national process, progress in one area becomes dependent on progress in all the others.
DTIC said in September 2025 that the Hemp and Cannabis Commercialisation Policy was expected to proceed through Cabinet approval and public comment, while an overarching Cannabis Bill was expected to reach Parliament only by mid-2027. The result is an uncomfortable contradiction: government expects measurable growth from the cannabis economy while significant parts of the framework required for broader lawful commercial participation remain unfinished.
The effect on the ground is predictable. A hemp permit may allow a farmer to cultivate, but without dependable offtake, processing capacity and downstream demand, cultivation is not industrialisation. A specialised medical pathway can support licensed cultivation and exports, but it does not constitute a domestic commercial cannabis economy. Traditional growers cannot build sustainable livelihoods from policy recognition alone, while existing businesses cannot plan investment against a market-access framework that remains unresolved.
Another committee will not create a customer. There is no reason, however, why the entire industry must remain frozen while government completes the long legislative process.
H3 has proposed a controlled route that works through existing policy and lawful regulatory mechanisms, separating private adult use, hemp, medical access and broader commercial activity rather than treating them as one regulatory problem. The objective is not to pretend that existing prohibitions have disappeared. It is to use controlled mechanisms and structured pilot environments to test implementation, gather evidence and solve practical regulatory problems while the longer-term framework is being completed.
South Africa should by now be capable of legislating and implementing at the same time.
The cannabis sector has meanwhile invested its own capital, developed products, cultivation capacity, traceability systems, skills and businesses, often while navigating rules that government itself acknowledges remain fragmented. Much of the economy has developed despite regulatory uncertainty rather than because government succeeded in removing it.
At the current pace, some of the pioneers may need an old-age home, or perhaps a hemp cemetery, before the commercialisation plan finally catches up with the industry it was supposed to create.
Yet DTIC still wants another 10% growth.
Wonderful. We are ready. Where do we apply to enter the R14bn industry government wants us to grow by 10%?
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