Black South African agricultural organizations are not content on standing by while the country’s legal cannabis industry kicks off on a racist foot. Last week, the Black Farmers’ Association of South Africa and allies held a protest in the capital city of Pretoria calling out the government’s agency that regulates cannabis for blocking Indigenous farmers from participating in the country’s budding legal cannabis industry.
“We feel that the skew[ed] allocation of these licenses to white companies, it is a crime against the black economic empowerment policy and the Constitution of our country,” BFASA stated in a press release announcing the April 22 protest.
The Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment is a plan that was adopted by the country in 2003 to compensate for land that had been stolen from Black farmers during South African apartheid.
BFASA identifies the high cost of business license applications as a sign of the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (commonly referred to as SAHPRA)’s “radical fight against transformation. This is the highest form of segregating people from rural areas [of] which [the] majority [are] previously disadvantaged.”
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