New season, lower fees: why we’re opening SACHIDA’s doors wider this spring

Spring begins on 1 September, and for South Africa’s growers it has always marked the same thing: time to plant, time to build for the season ahead. We think it’s the right moment for SACHIDA to do the same — which is why, from today, we’re cutting our membership fees, in some cases to zero, and inviting a much wider slice of the industry to the table.

Membership is now free for community-based organisations, non-profits, research institutions, student bodies and similar non-commercial groups. SMMEs pay R500 a year. Large and commercial businesses pay R75,000 a year. That’s it — no complicated tiers, no barriers dressed up as process.

Why now? Two things are converging that make a united industry voice more important than it’s been in a long time. First, draft regulations under the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act are expected within the next few months, and SACHIDA wants to coordinate a single, credible industry response rather than see dozens of fragmented submissions cancel each other out. Second, we’re heading into our Annual General Meeting in November, held in hybrid format so anyone can join in person or online — and we want the leadership and priorities that come out of that AGM to reflect the industry as it actually is, not just the part of it that could afford to be in the room.

That’s the whole point of SACHIDA, really: we exist to bring a genuinely splintered industry together — cannabis clubs, retailers, licensed cultivation and processing facilities, commercial growers and traders, community cultivators, research institutions, and Indigenous Knowledge Systems custodians — under one roof. A fee structure that only the well-resourced part of that list could afford was never going to get us there.

We’re also continuing to push, hard, for promulgation of the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act. We’re honest that the Act isn’t perfect, and neither will the regulations be. But right now cannabis still sits as a Schedule 6 substance under the Drugs and Drugs Trafficking Act, and it’s that listing — not the detail of the new Act — that leaves ordinary cultivators and traders exposed to inconsistent enforcement, and in some cases to harassment by rogue police officials. Promulgation is what removes that listing. Getting the fine print right can, and should, come after — through the ongoing consultation SACHIDA is already having with the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and the dtic. But it can’t happen until promulgation happens first.

So: if you’ve been sitting on the edge of the industry conversation because membership felt like it wasn’t for you, or wasn’t affordable, this is us telling you it is both. Join us, have a say in how the industry responds to the regulations coming down the line, and help shape where SACHIDA goes at the AGM in November.

Sign up on our membership page — it takes a few minutes, and for most of the industry, it now costs nothing at all.