Craft cannabis growers have a lot to offer rural communities, but new Health Canada regulations may be a mixed blessing, experts say.

In May, Health Canada announced that those applying for licenses to grow cannabis must have a fully built site meeting all cannabis regulations. In the announcement, Health Canada cited the changes would address the wait time for licensing.

Why it matters: Developing an industry of small cannabis growers has the potential to create new economic opportunities for rural communities.

Cam Battley believes that in the not-too-distant future, his company — one of Canada’s largest licensed producers — will be exporting a “significant chunk” of the cannabis it is growing domestically.

“We have a massive market over in Europe, even in Latin America,” says Battley, chief corporate officer at Aurora Cannabis Inc. “These countries are legalizing medicinal cannabis one by one but they’re not growing as much as us. They’re going to need product, and we’ve already got the ball rolling on exporting.”

There are numerous ways to measure product uptake. Tens of thousands of books are sitting on business school library shelves across the world with documented techniques on how to assess the distance a product has traveled into its life journey. Sometimes, however, it's just obvious that something big has started and is on the precipice of being far bigger — no books required.

Cannabis is one such industry, with all the signs indicating that weed may play out to be one of the biggest investible megatrends of our lifetime.

In October 2018, Canada fully legalized the adult use of recreational cannabis, the first major western country to do so on a national scale. This is why many of the pure-play cannabis stocks we see today are only listed in Canada.

Molson Coors Brewing's (TAP) cannabis joint venture plans to start selling multiple types of pot beverages on Canadian shelves the first day they can legally be sold, though they won't contain alcohol.

The maker of Coors Light has partnered with Gatineau, Quebec-based Hexo(HEXO) to make a variety of non-alcoholic, cannabis-infused drinks for the Canadian market. The joint venture, called Truss, will have "lots of different beverages" for sale on Dec. 16, when the beverages become legal in Canada, said Jay McMillan, Hexo's vice president of strategic development.

Over the past couple of years, few, if any, industries have beaten the returns offered by marijuana stocks. Some of the most popular pot stocks in the industry have delivered returns that, in some instances, have topped 2,000% since the beginning of 2016.

It's not hard to understand why investors are so bullish on the weed industry. After logging $12.2 billion in worldwide sales in 2018, according to Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics, global sales are set to soar to between $50 billion and $75 billion by end of the next decade, based on various Wall Street estimates. This should, presumably, yield quite a few winners in the cannabis space.

There's arguably no industry creating more metaphorical and literal buzz than marijuana. What had once been a taboo industry is no longer, with worldwide sales expected to grow four to six times the $12.2 billion generated (legally) in 2018 by the end of the next decade.

It was a mixed bag in the cannabis-related news world this week.

It’s not often you get to witness the opening of a whole new market sector. After last year’s move by the Canadian Parliament to fully legalize marijuana and cannabis products throughout the country, and the increasing numbers of American states south of the border pursuing similar legalization policies, we are seeing just that. As Giadha Aquirre de Carcer, CEO of New Frontier Data, put it in a report on the worldwide cannabis market, “The legal cannabis industry has truly gone global; even in the face of extensive prohibition, cannabis consumption grows, and attitudes and challenging perceptions about the typical cannabis user continue to shift.”

Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane wants to make the province home to South Africa’s first cannabis industry – already reading proposals from interested international parties, and working on feasibility studies to register farms.

Speaking to the City Press, Mabuyane said that people had been growing cannabis in the province for years, but now the opportunity exists to formalise it, and turn it into a lucrative industry.

He said that the stigma attached to cannabis is that of smoking and getting high, but in markets in Europe and Canada, there is a large industry built around the plant, which includes medicines, bio-fuels and other products.

Cannabis stocks have encountered choppy conditions in the spring, which should come as no surprise after a hot start to the year. The largest cannabis company in Canada by market cap is Canopy Growth (TSX:WEED)(NYSE:CGC). Shares of Canopy Growth had dropped 10.4% month over month as of close on June 12. The stock was still up 55.8% in 2019 so far.