A craft brewery backed by two prominent CEOs of JSE-listed companies says it has launched the country’s first beer made with cannabis.

A growing number of countries in Africa are looking to cannabis as the ticket out of poverty, and foreign investment for this sector has flooded in. Activists who pushed for legal commercial cultivation 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.

South African cannabis policy is currently at a crossroads. In 2018, the Constitutional Court effectively decriminalised private cannabis use. Since then, the government has continued to grapple with how to regulate this plant and its products, locally called ‘dagga’.