Morocco Cannabis Agency Trains Farmers in 3 Provinces
Morocco's cannabis regulator ANRAC has launched a training programme for licensed 2026-campaign cooperatives and farmers in Taounate, Chefchaouen and Al Hoceïma, focused on compliance and productivity.
Morocco's National Agency for the Regulation of Cannabis-Related Activities (ANRAC) has launched a training programme for all cooperatives and farmers licensed for the 2026 campaign, running until next December. The first session was held in Taounate the week of 12 October, before moving to Chefchaouen and then Al Hoceïma the following week, in response to requests raised by farmers during the Agency's periodic field meetings.
Two focuses: compliance and productivity
The programme centres on two areas. The first is compliance: crop quality often falls short of industrial and pharmaceutical requirements, so the training covers cooperative governance, hygiene, approved inputs, and harvesting and drying, aiming for a product certified to the international GACP and GMP standards required under the Good Agricultural and Harvest Practices guide set out in Article 33 of Law 13-21. The second is productivity, since low yield per hectare keeps raising production costs and makes legal cannabis less competitive to sell.
Cultivated area up more than twentyfold since 2023
According to a written answer from the then-Interior Minister, Abdelouafi Laftit, to parliament under the previous legislature, the number of farmers inside the legal framework rose from 430 in 2023 to 7,052 in 2025, spread across 413 production cooperatives, while the cultivated area jumped from 192 to 4,729 hectares — more than a twentyfold increase in two years. The table below shows the breakdown by province:
| Province | Area (ha) | Farmers |
|---|---|---|
| Taounate | 2,045 | 2,612 |
| Al Hoceïma | 1,343 | 1,492 |
| Chefchaouen | 1,341 | 1,417 |
Downstream, ANRAC issued 235 licences in 2025 to 165 operators, including 44 processing cooperatives, 23 individuals and 98 Moroccan companies, split between 127 processing/manufacturing licences, 42 transport, 27 marketing, 23 seed and plant import, 15 export and one nursery licence. At the same time, 111 licences were withdrawn for non-compliance, and the Agency carried out 5,430 inspections through the end of August 2025, including 2,801 on farming activity and 1,557 on transport. The minister described the Agency's record, in under three and a half years of existence, as achieved "with rigour and responsibility".
An economic bet on Rif farmers
The training programme comes as Morocco bets on legal cannabis as an economic lever for Rif farmers: the sector has already exported 17 products, equal to 312 tonnes of dry matter, to fifteen countries, while 646 pharmacies nationwide sell cosmetics and food supplements derived from it. Four Moroccan cannabis-based medicines for epilepsy -one from Pharma 5 and three from Sothema- are still awaiting approval from the Moroccan Medicines and Health Products Agency before reaching pharmacies.