During last night's newscast, you heard Kareem Musa, the Minister of Home Affairs and New Growth Industries, discussing a number of important topics during his encounter with the press yesterday.
In that conversation, the topic of hemp came up, and the press asked him for an update on his ministry's plan for improved regulations of what could a lucrative industry for Belize. Viewers will remember that his ministry held a virtual town hall meeting 3 weeks ago to discuss the wider topic of cannabis legalization. In that conversation, Musa told the Belizeans who tuned in that while policy changes for marijuana legalization and regulation were still several months away, his ministry was closer to finishing up policy changes for industrial hemp. He added that these changes would be introduced sometime this month.
Here's what he had to say the media asked about it:
Hon. Kareem Musa- Minister of Home Affairs and new Growth Ind.
"In relation to the industrial hemp licenses that currently exist what I can tell you is that the last administration issued 36 licenses. I shared all of those licenses with your counterpart over at KREM, she had ask me for that very early on in our administration and that was provided to her. I can also share that with you all. Out of those 36 industrial hemp licenses only one company Tropican Farms is actually growing hemp in our country and so we are also revisiting all of the regulations surrounding industrial hemp, not just cannabis for the future, but industrial hemp, because when you look at the system that was in place in the last administration there was no type of zoning that was taken place. There was no application fees that the government was collecting and these particular license holders have no experience at all with industrial hemp. Most of them did not even provide a business plan and so that is why we are currently undergoing a revisiting of the regulations and we will be amending the statutory instrument very shortly to incorporate these new regulations that are put in place, because while it is that both of these industries are very lucrative industries in other countries, if you don't have the appropriate plan in place, regulations in place you will not get anywhere as you can see today."
