Government intervention is critical to saving landraces as they are under enormous pressure in a tight and highly competitive market dominated by more popular cultivars, says Philasande Mahlakata, an indigenous cannabis expert based in the Eastern Cape.
“Their intervention would be key. People are slowly moving away from indigenous strains and gravitating towards the hybrids based on street prices,” she says, adding that the value of landraces on the market is currently comparatively low. Landrace cannabis is almost exclusively restricted to recreational use and very few people “want to smoke it because of the low potency”.
READ: Philisande’s story: From Village Kid to Village Divah Organics
Apart from potency, the manner of cultivation is also distinctive: whereas growers of landraces can cast their seed and let the plant grow naturally, uninterrupted by little to no intervention, spacing and a lot of care often go into hybrids, including irrigation and fertilisation. This ultimately impacts the price point in the market.
However, it is ultimately potency that gives hybrids the upper hand. The average landrace THC potency ranges between 3-4% and one would be hard-pressed these days to find a variety which can potentially touch 7%, according to Philasande. “I haven’t come across a 7% strain,” she states. Conversely, hybrids can have 13%-17% or even 23% THC potency, thus greatly overshadowing the indigenous cultivars.
“While a gram of landrace can cost R1 for example, a hybrid gram fetches between R15 – R20, down from R50 twenty years ago. You’d be lucky to get R25 a gram,” notes Philasande who has observed the cultivation market getting saturated over the years.
She believes the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (DALRRD) can make a critical intervention and save landraces by extending the same support to landraces that it has lent entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Also of concern to traditional growers are the complications surrounding legislation. “’We keep wondering what’s going to come out of these two years of consultation. We sat through the bill [Cannabis for Private Purposes] but when it first came out, it was released on social media and did not acknowledge us as traditional farmers. It was more than 20 pages of legal jargon. We’re illiterate. We cannot process this.”
The provision allowing four plants per individual and eight per household as stipulated in the Cannabis for Private Purposes, 2024, which apparently did not factor in the varying uses of the plant, is a bone of contention. “Some put it in the tea, some use it for steaming,” notes Philasande.
“We are anxious because policies and laws are being formulated by people who have never been into cultivation or trade,” she argues while criticising the almost wholesale delegation of policymaking to “economists, scientists and academia”, in other words, people without the practical experience essential for an insider perspective.
However, the SAPS’ suspension of aerial spraying activity has brought some relief as no SAPS helicopters have returned to Pondoland skies since the public outcry in 2015 and the lawsuit in the High Court in Makhanda by Umzimvubu Farmers Support Network.
Project manager for cannabis development at the Eastern Cape Rural Development Agency (ECRDA) Sunshine Blouw referred Cannabiz Africa to the national Department of Agriculture and the Agriculture Research Council (ARC) citing his organisation’s mandate as the implementing arm of policies developed by the relevant organs. Neither department had reached out to Cannabiz Africa at the time of going to publication.
