The cannabis industry has been one of the real huge worldwide success stories of the past few years. It has seen absolutely explosive growth, and before March of 2020 showed absolutely no signs of slowing down at all.
CBD and other products have been incredible boons to public health, and huge successes in the marketplace. Companies like https://cannabispromotions.com/ were taking the world by storm and it seemed like nothing was ever going to stop them or even slow them.
The world is a different place now. So let’s look at the current state of the industry, try to make some sense of all this, and perhaps try to also predict the future.
Difficulty of Cash Transactions
In many localities the world over, the cannabis industry has relied heavily on cash for sales, for various reasons. Often e-commerce providers and online wallets are wary of touching cannabis, even in jurisdictions where there is no legal issue whatsoever.
Since the world has moved heavily online, this complication has become exponentially worse.
Logistics
Cannabis crops are, of course, almost always grown in rural areas, just like just about any other crop grown on any sort of a medium or large scale.
The problem with cannabis is that in many places on Earth it’s not considered an essential crop, despite its obvious and many medicinal properties. Because of this, it’s hard to move the harvested crop to where it needs to go in a timely manner, or even at all.
Also, cannabis companies don’t have a typical agro distribution chain at all. The companies tend to have headquarters in big urban centers that manage the crops which are often located in more than one rural area. People from the companies were accustomed to having to go back and forth between the various fields and the company HQ.
This type of travel is often restricted these days, and once again, if cannabis isn’t considered essential, there are no exemptions made for this rule.
Regulatory Shutdowns.
The cannabis industry by its very nature has found itself confronted by the necessity of working closely with local, national and international regulatory bodies in order to register, distribute, import, export and market its products.
These days, even in the best of all possible scenarios, these agencies are still severely understaffed, causing serious delays in the issuing of things like sanitary certificates and licenses.
Currently just under half of all the world’s medicinal cannabis crops are located in Colombia, and the Colombian version of the FDA (called INVIMA) has all but shut down since the lockdown started. And what little resources they have have been directed, understandably, to the review and approval of essential PPE such as masks, and medical equipment such as ventilators, etc.
This, combined with some very draconian regulatory issues where cannabis companies need to constantly renew multiple permissions and licenses in order to continue operating legally, has caused some very thorny problems for registered cannabis companies.
