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| Dr Tahndi Kunene (Photo: House of Hemp) |
JUST after The Witness reported on iDube-based House of Hemp being the best placed company to supply all of SA’s medicinal cannabis needs, an international venture bought 60%
of the company last week.
Dr Thandeka Kunene’s House of Hemp (HoH) sold a 60% interest to
Canadian venture capital firm LGC, and its strategic partner in Africa, AfriAg.
LGC said in a statement, “With the additional resources of this
partnership, we’ll be focusing on increasing our growing footprint at iDube, so
as to produce export-quantities of high-grade medical
cannabis.”
cannabis.”
HoH is growing the equivalent 40 rugby fields of cannabidiol-rich
dagga at Block D of iDube Tradeport’s Agrizone Complex. Several cannabis growers
in KZN staged a protest at iDube, questioning how HoH got permission to grow
plants that look like plain old dagga and not like the long, thin stalks of hemp plants.
In Canada, any cannabis with less than one percent of the
psycho-active cannabinoid Tetrahydrocannabinol, qualifies as hemp, not cannabis,
although the plants look exactly alike.
Kunene has experimenting with hemp for decades in South Africa, on
projects from the Eastern Cape to Soweto. A qualified engineer with an MBA, she
was the first woman to earn her doctorate in mathematics from the University of
Cape Town and has often stated her view that cultivation of the cannabis plant
can alleviate a lot of SA’s poverty.
She has served as a member of the advisory board at Global Hemp
Group and was instrumental in creating two of the industry’s most important
industry groups: The National Hemp Foundation and The Global Natural Fibre
Forum.
In 1998, she combined these two visions, founding House of Hemp in
Johannesburg, and it became the first private company to be awarded an exclusive
permit from the departments of Agriculture and Health to legally cultivate and
process hemp in South Africa.
The huge greenhouse at iDube has since 2015 hosted research into
medical cannabis with a focus on strains that are high in CBD, in partnership
with the South African departments of Agriculture and Health, the University of
the Free State and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
Paradoxically, the investment in HoH does not mean any other South
Africans can start cultivating cannabis, as the Medicines and Related Substances
Act, the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act and the Environmental Conservation Act
all prohibit even hemp from being grown in SA.
The constitutionality of these laws are being challenged in the
“Trial of the Plant”, which started at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria
yesterday.
(First published in The Witness on 2 August 2017)
