Lesotho's Cannabis Economy: A 16th-Century Legend and a 21st-Century Export Industry

Cannabis has been part of Lesotho’s economy for longer than almost any formal record can confirm. Oral tradition among the Basotho holds that the Koena people used cannabis as a medium of exchange to acquire land from resident San communities as early as 1550, generations before Lesotho existed as a recognized kingdom, though the claim rests on oral history rather than any surviving written record from the period and should be read as tradition rather than an independently documented transaction. What’s better documented is that cannabis cultivation, grown informally in Lesotho’s highland districts for generations, became one of the country’s genuine sources of hard currency alongside international development aid and the wages Basotho men sent home after working in South African mines, an economic role that persisted for decades even while the crop itself remained illegal.

That changed formally in 2017, when Lesotho’s government began licensing cannabis cultivation for medicinal and scientific purposes, making it the first African nation to legalize the plant in any regulated form. The Ministry of Health issued licenses to both larger operators and local growers, with the explicit stated goal of formalizing an industry that already existed informally and turning it into a source of legal export revenue and employment in a country with persistently high youth unemployment. MG Health Limited became the first company granted a license to grow cannabis for medical and scientific purposes under the new framework, and government officials pitched the sector as a path toward the kind of export revenue Lesotho’s small, landlocked economy has historically struggled to generate.

The reality since 2017 has proven more complicated than the initial licensing framework anticipated. A 2024 study published in the Journal of Cannabis Research, based on interviews with managers at licensed Lesotho cannabis companies, documented a sector still working through significant structural barriers: high compliance and licensing costs relative to the scale many growers can achieve, limited direct access to the lucrative Canadian, European, and other international medicinal markets the industry was originally pitched around, and a gap between the policy’s ambitions and the on-the-ground economics facing companies actually trying to operate under it. Most of what licensed Lesotho producers do manage to sell moves offshore rather than through domestic processing or retail.

Lesotho’s cannabis story, then, runs on two very different timelines: a centuries-old role as an informal cash crop reaching back, by tradition, to the 1500s, and a formal legal industry not yet a decade old that researchers studying it in 2024 still described as facing real headwinds before it can deliver the broader economic transformation its 2017 legalization promised.