Legal cannabis offers Morocco a route into Europe

Alamy/Sean Sprague

• World’s largest resin producer
• Trade worth ‘billions’
• 4,800 illegal farmers pardoned

The King of Morocco, Mohammed Vl, has taken the unprecedented step of pardoning more than 4,800 illegal cannabis farmers in the north of his country. 

Mohammed El Guerrouj, the head of the National Agency for the Regulation of Cannabis-Related Activities (Anrac), said the decision was made to encourage farmers to grow cannabis legally and to improve living conditions. 

Anrac also reported that it had approved nearly 3,000 licences for cannabis cultivation and production so far this year, mainly in the provinces of Taounate, Chefchaouen and Al Hoceïma, up from 609 issued in the whole of 2023. 

The moves are part of Morocco’s strategy to legitimise a once-buoyant criminal enterprise, which it believes could be worth billions of dollars in legal trade.

Tom Blickman, a policy researcher and expert in the drugs industry at the Transnational Institute, a think-tank based in Amsterdam, told AGBI the initiatives show that the policies around cannabis were relaxing in Morocco.

The easing started in 2021 with the passing of a law that allowed cannabis growing for medical and industrial purposes.

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However, medical and industrial applications are not the main market for cannabis, which is recreational, “and that is still not allowed,” Blickman said.

Anrac has produced an official logo for legalised cannabis. It was proudly used for the first legal cannabis harvest, which only took place last year. It produced 294 tonnes of the drug. Of that, only a tiny fraction – 225kg – was exported legally. 

This is a modest start, but Morocco, which is the largest producer of cannabis resin in the world, has its eye on grabbing a larger market share in Europe.

The Moroccan Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry and Innovation forecasts annual revenues of MAD4.2 billion to MAD6.3 billion ($400 million to $600 million) within four years.

However, this relies on Morocco securing a 10 percent to 15 percent share of the legal European market. Even that is small when measured against the illegal trade.

Morocco supplies an estimated 70 percent of illegal cannabis entering Europe. The 2024 European Drug Report has estimated that 8 percent of adults in Europe – 23 million people – have used the drug this year. The main route for the illegal trade is through Spain, easily accessible across the narrow straits. 

An indication of the size of the trade is that in 2021 Spain seized 672 tonnes of resin coming from Morocco, which accounted for more than four-fifths of the total seized in the European Union that year.

There is a strong financial incentive for the government to act. 

Insight Partners, a market research company, has forecast the medical cannabis market alone could grow at nearly 30 percent a year and reach $97 billion by 2031, from $17 billion in 2023.

The crop generates $4 billion to $11 billion annually for European drug dealers, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Only a tiny proportion of that is realised by the often-impoverished Moroccan farmers who grow the crop.

Socio-economic conditions in the Rif region, which depends heavily on cannabis production, and where the poverty rate and birth rate are higher than the national average, are challenging.

It is a tender political spot for the Moroccan government.

“The government is between two fires,” said Mohamed Chtatou, professor of anthropology at the International University of Rabat.

“The fire of these poor people who want to make a living and the fire of Europe, which wants Morocco to put an end to this illegal trade.”

Blickman said that if the cannabis industry was taken away from Rif, “the poverty would explode”, and locals would have no choice but “to go to the cities or migrate to Europe”.