Global Ganja Report

Can Rural America's Expropriated Use a New Crop to Forge a New Agrarianism?

Green Heffa Farms, in North Carolina’s Piedmont, has emerged as a national symbol of vision and success in America’s new hemp economy. As a producer of boutique full-spectrum hemp-flower products, it has won a cachet in the industry—which is augmented, at least in more enlightened sectors, by the fact that it is Black-owned, and has an overt political consciousness.

Green Heffa’s CEO is Clarenda Stanley—popularly known as Farmer Cee. She was featured in the April issue of Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine, and was last year the 2019 “Featured Farmer” for National Hemp History Week.

A growing number of countries on the African continent are looking to cannabis as the ticket out of poverty, and foreign investment for this sector is flooding in. Activists who pushed for legal commercial cultivation will now face the challenge of crafting a cannabis economy that empowers small farmers and rural communities, rather than replicating the elitist forms of past agro-export industries.

An esteemed scholar and writer from ancient Rome recently re-emerged in the news with reports that a forensic study confirmed claims that his skull had been found. Historians of the cannabis plant have long contended that Pliny the Elder was among the first to make note of its curative and psychoactive properties.

The legendary hemp crusader Jack Herer drew up a California ballot initiative for a cannabis economy based on maximum freedom. He did not live to see its passage. But amid growing disillusionment with the Prop 64 legalization model, his heirs believe that in 2020, his hour has posthumously arrived.

The new budget just released by New York's Gov. Andrew Cuomo includes his promised cannabis legalization measure. But activists in the Empire State will be watching closely to see if the proposed legislation delivers on his pledge to instate legalization in a way the corrects the social harms of prohibition.

Zambia becomes the latest African country to legalize cannabis cultivation—in the midst of a shriveling drought that has caused massive crop failures. The landlocked republic could be an unwilling test case in whether cannabis is as effective a drought-resistant crop as its boosters claim.

Much media hype anticipates an imminent cannabis boom in Africa, and foreign investment is indeed pouring into a few key countries on the continent. But some dreams have also come to naught—and a few initiatives have displayed some of the worst tendencies of corporate agribusiness in the developing world.

2019 saw advances for cannabis freedom on both the national and global stage—but also some near-misses, from New York state to Mexico, which have left activists frustrated if no less determined. As advocates prepare to carry the fight into 2020, here's a review of what was achieved—or almost achieved—over the past 12 months.