Medicinal Marijuana offers new opportunities for Australian agriculture
2/3/2017
The Health Minister Greg Hunt announced medical marijuana could be easier to import to Australia by streamlining the process until local suppliers are able to meet demand. The Victoria Government has already harvested its first crop and approved it's trial in a treatment for epilepsy.
Israel, the United States and Canada have already seen a boom in the Medical marijuana business and many of those global companies are among the 25 who have applied for a licence to grow and manufacture cannabis in Australia.The value of the opportunity in the domestic market is estimated at $100m/year and with cannabis expensive and difficult to import there is plenty of interest.
The issue for smaller farming operations is the difficulties in growing medicinal cannabis as a broad acre crop like poppies. Most companies are applying to grow in glasshouses for security and production reasons.
One of the player is WA firm AusCann, part-owned by the world's biggest medicinal producer Canadian Canpopy Growth Corporation.
AusCann CEO Elaine Darby said that relationship has supplied genetics and pharmaceutical knowledge, and support in the raising of a rapid $5million in a recent relisting on the stock exchange. AusCann is still waiting however for Federal Government licence approval to proceed.
AusCann has contracted a security firm to do a security assessment required for all manufacturing and cultivation operations to reduce the risk of medicinal cannabis being diverted to the black market.
"They have the fit and proper person test … not only your board of directors, all of your employees, anyone you associate with all have to have full police clearance."
Ms Darby said they planned to use glasshouses with retractable roofs partly for security but also to maximise the growing conditions.
"If you grow this plant in Australia outdoors you only get one crop, but if you can artificially light you can get three, maybe four crops a year out of them."
She said the company was looking at a site "not too far out of Perth".
Whatever is grown in Australia will have to be processed and packaged as medicine.
A small pharmaceutical company based in Melbourne is involved in preparing medicinal cannabis for two medical trials under way in NSW. For security reasons they cannot be identified but the chief executive said there was a lot of interest in growing cannabis in Australia because importing it is difficult.
"You need import permits into Australia but also the shipping country needs an export permit.
"Permits can take anywhere between 30-60 days so it makes it difficult to transport these products between countries."
He said there were are opportunities for seed companies to develop seed stocks and for companies involved in extracting oil as that is used in the production of pharmaceutical products.
This full article appeared online at ABC.net.au
