Abstract:

The South African Constitutional Court ruled (2018) that it is not a criminal offence for an adult citizen to use, possess or grow cannabis in private for personal consumption. As legalisation of both medical and recreational cannabis continues to spread around the world (Owram, 2019), the South African (RSA) Government wants to have concept plans for the development of the cannabis sector in place by October 2019, considering the potential the industry could hold for job creation. South Africa is reviewing the opportunities & inherent benefits of decriminalising cannabis by-products (BusinessTech, 2019c) with the Eastern Cape (‘cannabis-belt’) being one of the focus areas for agricultural expansion and growth in the South African agricultural sector. Given “imminent” legislative changes; the Eastern Cape with high levels of unemployment, has the right climate for cannabis production (Gerwel, 2018). The Eastern Cape needs to tap into this emerging economy, so that new growth engines are started for the benefit of its people (Mabuyane, 2019). This empirically based paper explores job creation through the contemporaneous commercial viability of cannabis within the agri-business sector against the landscape of local economic development (LED). Although this paper is rooted in the local economic development of the Eastern Cape, the mixed method methodology collected and analysed data from 107 respondents based in four countries (South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe). Due to appropriate legislation not being fully promulgated in RSA, the exact economic potential cannot be fully appropriated; however extant literature does provide historical data and projected incomes. This paper applies a Contribution Analysis Approach in assessing causal questions and inferring causality in the agri-business program. The approach is supported in revising the Theory of Change (TOC) which is commonly used to estimate the wider-reaching economic impacts of the cannabis cultivation activity.