INAES Seeks to Strengthen Medical Cannabis Producers’ Cooperatives

On Tuesday, July 27 at 5 p.m., through the Webex platform and Spain’s National Institute of Associativism and Social Economy’s (INAES) Coordination of Training for Cooperatives and Mutuals, the first day of a series of meetings aimed at opening a dialogue with organizations and producers linked to the value chain of medical cannabis and industrial hemp will be held in the context of the half sanction of the regulatory framework for this activity in Congress.

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A Regulatory Agency for Hemp and Medical Cannabis

The ruling approved on July 15 in the Spanish Senate provides for the creation of a Regulatory Agency for hemp and medical cannabis in industry, for the purpose of “regulating, controlling and issuing administrative authorizations with respect to the use of cannabis plant seeds, cannabis, and its by-products.”

This framework grants INAES the responsibility to generate specific regulations to promote the creation of cooperatives for production purposes within the hemp and medical cannabis chain and to accompany organizations producers who wish to adopt this figure, not only in terms of obtaining their registration, but also in their first years of production with concrete incentives through financing lines that start from the recognition of previous work, value the different stages in which each project is found and accompany the production horizons that each one of them sets.

Creating Cooperatives and Recognizing Knowledge and Know-How

Article 12 of the aforementioned ruling confers on INAES the responsibility of issuing specific regulations for the creation of cooperatives dedicated to the activities of the hemp and medical cannabis production chain. This responsibility also implies the accompaniment of the organizations and producers who want to adopt the cooperative figure for the insertion in the new hemp and medical cannabis framework as a continuity of their activities, and with a special regime in the authorizations and in the administrative circuits.

The opinion proposes to recognize the knowledge, know-how, and experience that those who have been working in this chain have about the production and uses of hemp and medical cannabis. The creation of cooperatives that allow the territorial insertion of producers within regional economies allows building a new industry with a strong federal presence and hopeful horizons on the road to economic reactivation.

Favorable Conditions for a Hemp and Medical Cannabis Industry

The possibility of generating specific authorization regimes that contemplate the particularities of small producers, encourage associativism, and structure their productive organization on the legal structure of cooperativism, generate favorable conditions for the promotion of actions aimed at formalizing the work of civil society organizations and provide them with an associative framework that adjusts to their needs. It also allows favorable institutional development and financial support options that accompany the expectations of scalability in production and the possibilities of containing a demand that may increase as soon as the new Law is regulated.

The recognition of the knowledge acquired by civil society, in its different organizational forms, as well as the promotion of associative productive spaces and their new institutional life in cooperative entities, allows the conformation of new productive nuclei in our country that adapt to regional potentialities. Accompanying the process of conformation of these entities into cooperatives will promote the development of the industry with a federal and deconcentrated scope, creating quality work with specific frameworks adjusted to the different productive scales.

This first conference is aimed at learning about the principles of cooperativism and its internal organization forms, sharing previous experiences on the subject, and learning about the principles of associativism and its organization forms.

Development of two Main Axes for Medical Cannabis and Hemp Development

In conversation with ANSOL, Bárbara Witko, representative of INAES, developed the two main axes on which INAES is working: “The first one is related to the bill and it is about the generation of specific regulation for producers who want to become cooperatives. We are working on a specific resolution for those organizations that want to become cooperatives and that want to adopt a specific framework, as is the case of registration for already constituted cooperatives.”

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(Featured image by Rick Proctor via Unsplash)

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First published in La nueva manana , a third-party contributor translated and adapted the article from the original. In case of discrepancy, the original will prevail.

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