South African farmers have developed some of the world’s most distinctive and resilient cannabis landraces over generations.
Durban Poison, the hardy strains from Mpondoland and the Wild Coast, and other regional varieties were shaped through seed selection, adaptation to local soils and climates, and the transfer of cultivation knowledge across generations.
These landraces form part of South Africa’s agricultural heritage and represent valuable genetic resources. Many are drought-resistant, adapted to local conditions, and sought after by breeders internationally. Yet the farmers and communities who preserved these genetics through prohibition, criminalisation, and decades of exclusion remain largely outside the formal commercial framework now developing around cannabis.
The contradiction is becoming increasingly visible.
South African landraces continue to appear in international breeding programmes and private genetic collections, while South Africa still lacks a practical national framework to document, register, or protect farmer-developed cannabis genetics. There is no central landrace register, no straightforward process for communities to establish provenance, and no operational benefit-sharing system specifically adapted to cannabis.
The current legal framework was developed primarily around commercial breeding systems. The Plant Breeders’ Rights Act and the Plant Improvement Act focus on varieties that are distinct, uniform, stable, and commercially reproducible. Traditional landraces fall outside these categories because they evolved through continuous farmer selection and environmental adaptation rather than controlled commercial breeding.
As a result, commercial breeders may stabilise or refine genetics derived from landraces and obtain protection over the resulting commercial varieties, while the original source populations and the communities who maintained them remain outside the protection system.
South Africa already possesses legal instruments capable of addressing this imbalance.
The country is a signatory to the Nagoya Protocol, which requires prior informed consent and fair benefit-sharing where genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge are used commercially. South African biodiversity and indigenous knowledge legislation already provides mechanisms capable of supporting these principles.
The rooibos industry demonstrated that such a system can function in practice. Through a formal benefit-sharing agreement, indigenous communities became recognised participants in the commercial value chain linked to traditional plant resources and knowledge systems. Cannabis has yet to follow a similar path.
This matters because legacy growers and small-scale rural farmers are central to the development and preservation of South Africa’s most recognisable cannabis genetics. Many of these communities maintained cultivation knowledge and seed stock during periods where cannabis cultivation carried criminal consequences and economic exclusion.
At the same time, the operational focus of the formal cannabis framework has centred on compliant commercial lines, pharmaceutical standards, and certified genetics, with limited accommodation for heterogeneous landraces or community seed systems.
Without documentation and protection mechanisms, these genetics remain vulnerable to extraction and external commercialisation. Once landrace material is stabilised and commercialised elsewhere, retrospective claims become significantly more difficult.
The issue now extends beyond heritage or symbolism.
It carries agricultural, commercial, and constitutional implications tied to ownership, participation, and value retention within South Africa’s cannabis sector.
A practical solution does not require an entirely new legal system. Existing frameworks could be adapted to support community-led documentation of landraces, biocultural community protocols, benefit-sharing agreements, cooperative stewardship structures, and geographical indication protections linked to regional cannabis heritage.
These mechanisms would support commercial development while creating a structured basis for participation and recognition.
The broader concern is that South Africa risks repeating a pattern seen in other agricultural sectors, where local genetic resources move outward, commercial value accumulates elsewhere, and the original custodians remain excluded from the resulting economic system.
South Africa possesses recognised genetics, experienced growers, and strong cultivation conditions.
The unresolved issue is whether the regulatory framework will evolve quickly enough to recognise and protect the communities that preserved these resources long before the industry attracted formal commercial interest.
Cannabis reform increasingly speaks the language of economic participation and industrialisation, while many of the people who protected the country’s most valuable genetics remain outside the formal structures intended to benefit from that growth.
The question has moved beyond policy theory. It now reaches into the centre of South Africa’s cannabis transition and forces a broader national discussion about ownership, preservation, participation, and economic justice within the emerging legal cannabis economy.
Who owns South Africa’s cannabis genetics, and who will benefit from them in the future?
Charl Botha (B.Proc) is a legal strategist, cannabis policy specialist, and co-founder of H3 Legal Solutions (Pty) Ltd. He has briefed Parliament on cannabis policy and industrialisation matters in South Africa.
