Encouraging the cultivation of non-psychoactive hemp in the country could be an opportunity, since it was already approved in the first debate in the National Assembly after two years of engave. This is bill 323 that promotes the agro-industrial development of hemp to boost the local agricultural sector.

Jorge Altamirano-Duque, representative of Panama to the Latin American Association of the Hemp Industry, and who collaborated with the drafting of this legislative initiative, explained in the “Portada” program of La Estrella de Panamá that this product has a wide productive potential, being an industry that is already in

It aspires to Panama to be a non-psychoactive hemp manufacturing center in the Americas, “it would bring a lot of work for the Panamanian farmer, money for the country, help reactivate the economy and help save planet Earth.”

The international market urgently needs to have greater infrastructure to manufacture hemp, and Panama could be the destination to meet that demand for its geographical and logistical advantage.

Among the advantages, Altamirano-Duque mentioned that it is a fast-growing product, since it can generate commercial products such as textiles, paper, medicine, food, feed, paint, biofuel, biodegradable plastic and construction material.

As for its “We are not competition internally, our competition is other countries, such as Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, that is, the big countries,” he said.

He pointed out that Panama should have an open industry, in which they work with other countries focusing on the issue of processing, manufacturing, and logistics, in order to become a hemp in America, “because there are also different types of hemp, there is hemp for fibers, for food, the issue of nutraceutics, for cosmetics and endless uses.”