‘Green rush’ Cannabis boom squeezing farmland in North America By Carey L. Biron Thomson Reuters Foundation WASHINGTON — While the coronavirus pandemic has caused the collapse of retail businesses across the globe, there is one thing people have been buying more of during months of lockdown: marijuana. The legal cannabis industry set sales records across the United States and Canada over the past 12 months, according to cannabis analytics firm New Frontier Data, which partially attributed the market’s growth to the COVID-19 outbreak. That lucrative revenue stream has caught the
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eye of cash-strapped local and state officials, but the surge in interest in cannabis has farmers and land experts worried about competition for the land needed to grow the plant. In recent years, leasable farmland has been harder to come by “because cannabis farmers could pay so much more,” said Maud Powell, an associate professor in the Small Farms Program at Oregon State University. “It’s like a land grab ... the green rush, they call it,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Top officials in at least three U.S. states have discussed the potential for the legalization of
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cannabis to create new revenue streams, said Erik Altieri, executive director of advocacy group NORML. Although the drug remains outlawed at the federal level, nearly two-thirds of U.S. states have legalized its use for medical or recreational purposes in recent years, while Canada took similar steps in 2018. Globally the legal cannabis industry was valued at more than $9 billion last year by consultancy Grand View Research, with about 90% of that business in North America. In California, more than two dozen jurisdictions
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