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Five years into the Cannabis Master Plan, where are we actually?
The Cannabis Master Plan launched in 2021 on a wave of talk about jobs, exports and a formal industry. This month marks five years, and Cannabiz Africa put it bluntly: we are no closer to a working commercial market than we were when it started. Their argument is that the one move that would actually mean something is removing cannabis from the Drugs Act.
The gap between the plan and the ground is easy to see. SAHPRA has issued medical licences to more than 120 operators, and by most accounts only a fraction of them are producing at anything like capacity. The hemp route is live, with just over 1,400 permits issued since December 2025, but the R40 billion industrialisation figure the dtic quotes is still a projection, not a market. The Hemp and Cannabis Commercialisation Policy has been "expected by April 2026" for a while, and the Overarching Cannabis Bill still has to reach Parliament. Real commercial licensing is not expected before mid-2027, and that date keeps sliding.
For a small grower the honest read is this. The private cultivation framework is the only part of the plan that is actually law today. The CfPPA is signed, the draft regulations set 750 grams and five plants, and that is the ground you can stand on right now. Everything above it, the licences, the export quotas, the commercial categories, is still being written.
I do not think that is a reason to sit still. It is the window where a craft grower builds something the commercial market will want later. The proof you build now, your cultivar, your terroir, your process, will be worth more once the licensed market opens than it would be to chase a licence that does not exist yet.