Ghana has done something many countries say they want to do: it opened the door to a new, climate-smart agricultural industry.

Parliament recognized industrial hemp — cannabis with no more than 0.3% THC — as a lawful crop. In plain language, this is hemp that cannot make anyone high. It’s used in textiles, construction materials, food products, cosmetics, and industrial fibers. It’s a development crop. A jobs crop. A value-addition crop.

Then Ghana regulated it as though it were a narcotic.

That contradiction is now before the Supreme Court in a constitutional case filed by the lawyer Amanda Akuokor Clinton on behalf of a farmer, Mariam Alhassan. It may sound like a narrow lawsuit about licensing. It isn’t. It’s a test of something bigger: whether a government can declare an industry legal while designing the regulatory gate so high that ordinary citizens cannot enter.

The framework under challenge was built under the Narcotics Control Commission Act and implemented through regulations governing cultivation and the movement of hemp. What the suit says — in careful constitutional language — is what many Ghanaian entrepreneurs would say more bluntly: the system turns “legal” into “impossible.”

Consider how modern economies actually work. Not everyone needs to plant hemp to be affected by hemp policy. Consumers are already living inside the contradiction.

In many places in Accra, you can buy imported hemp-derived products — skincare, oils, cosmetics — marketed with “hemp” on the label and containing trace amounts of hemp extract. A body scrub, a lotion, a hair product. These items circulate through regular commercial channels. No armed escort. No narcotics-style transport permit. No special security convoy.

But if a Ghanaian farmer wants to cultivate industrial hemp domestically — the same non-intoxicating plant ingredient that shows up in imported goods — the law can demand layers of licences, fees denominated in U.S. dollars, recurring levies, and transport controls designed for dangerous drugs. The case points to cultivation charges that can reach tens of thousands of dollars per hectare, plus annual percentage-based “regulatory” levies and additional compliance costs.

This is the kind of policy that looks neutral on paper but produces a predictable outcome in real life: it creates an industry reserved for those with deep pockets and foreign currency buffers. Smallholders and local cooperatives don’t lose because they lack talent or land; they lose because the entry price is engineered beyond reach.

In a country where currency volatility is not a footnote but a lived experience, pricing licences in U.S. dollars is not a technical detail. It’s a wall. It inserts global exchange-rate shocks into local farming decisions — a type of risk with nothing to do with public safety, product quality, or regulatory cost. It also quietly shifts the sector toward large capital players: corporations that can hedge, import finance, or absorb surprise costs. Those are not the people hemp was supposed to empower.

The deeper issue is constitutional, not botanical.

The Ghanaian Constitution doesn’t forbid regulation. It forbids arbitrary regulation — the kind that is irrational, unfair, or so disproportionate that it becomes a form of economic exclusion. That is why the case leans on provisions about administrative justice and the control of discretionary power. It also raises a question that other democracies recognize instantly: when do “fees” become taxes in disguise? If charges bear little relationship to the cost of regulation and function mainly as revenue instruments, then the democratic safeguards around taxation matter.

And the policy incoherence is hard to miss.

If the State’s concern is diversion or misuse, it has tools: testing, traceability, licensing, audits, and penalties. Many countries use those instruments without requiring armed escorts for a crop that is legally defined as non-narcotic. The current approach suggests that Ghana has imported not just regulation but fear — a lingering institutional reflex that sees the word “cannabis” and reaches for the narcotics playbook, even when Parliament itself drew a scientific and legal boundary.

That reflex has consequences. A country can’t build local value chains by punishing local value creation.

The result is a strange economic theater: imported hemp-based products can appear on Ghanaian shelves with ordinary commercial friction, while domestic farmers face extraordinary barriers to growing the underlying plant. If that remains the equilibrium, Ghana will have legalized hemp as a consumer brand while suppressing hemp as a Ghanaian livelihood.

This is exactly how inequality gets written into markets — not through slogans, but through spreadsheets, licensing tables, and regulatory discretion.

The Supreme Court case asks for declarations that the framework violates constitutional principles, and for an order compelling the state to redesign the regime into something tiered, scaled, and risk-based — more like agricultural regulation than narcotics control. Even if one disagrees with every number in the complaint, the moral and democratic premise is difficult to dismiss: regulation should manage risk, not manufacture exclusion.

Ghana doesn’t need to choose between safety and opportunity. It needs to stop pretending that safety requires the regulation of hemp like heroin.

Because when a government makes an industry “legal” but unreachable, it doesn’t regulate a market. It creates a cartel — and then calls it compliance.

By: Amanda Akuokor Clinton Esq.
Msc. In African Politics