(JNi.media) The annual conference of the Israeli Association of Appraisers held in Tel Aviv last week focused on the ability of Israeli farmers to grow and export medical cannabis overseas, and the enormous profits such an endeavor would yield.
“The medical cannabis market in the US is valued at $35 billion a year, and those figures continue to grow with each passing day,” the association’s chairman Doron Havkin told the conference. “We must undertake a significant move in the field and start generating profits right away.”
Havkin supports a government move that would allow massive starts in cannabis growing in an agricultural area spanning some 6,000 hectares in the Arava region, which desperately needs budgets and development. Havkin sees a solution to the area’s economic needs in dedicating it to growing exclusively medical marijuana for export.
“If Israel were to grow cannabis instead of bell peppers, the local economy would have shot up by many percentage points,” Said Dr. Tamir Gadot, CEO of Quest for Life, a company that supports growing medical cannabis for export.
Gadot stressed that “the government must start treating the medical cannabis market as a health-related industry par excellence, and begin to realize its enormous potential — which may exceed even the natural gas” discoveries.
The conference was attended by MK Tamar Zandberg (Meretz) and former MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud), both supporters of growing and exporting medical marijuana. “Everyone is looking at cannabis only as a medicine,” Sandberg told the Jerusalem Post, saying “it is time to understand that this is an agricultural product in every respect which should be licensed for export.”
If there is an expansion in the cannabis field, agricultural appraisers would have to receive special training to become proficient in financing and insuring medical marijuana. The association’s website expressed support for the legalization and expansion move, because, as they put it, it would create more work for farmers, which will indirectly create more work for appraisers.