St Vincent and the Grenadines Agriculture Minister Saboto Caesar has called on CARICOM and OECS governments to harmonise cannabis legislation, arguing that new entrants will save time and money if they adopt a shared framework instead of drafting laws on their own.

Speaking at the country’s cannabis 2nd Cannabliss 2025 Conference, Caesar warned that “repeating the mistakes can be extremely expensive” and urged member states to build on the experience of St Vincent and the Grenadines and Jamaica. He described a harmonised legal template as a “plug-and-play” solution that would prevent countries from spending years and scarce resources developing separate legislation.

Caesar pointed to CARICOM’s Waiting to Exhale study as the foundation for national policy decisions.

“What that document stated, basically, [is that] there are several pathways that you can utilise to develop your cannabis industry. One, you can go purely recreational… You can go purely medicinal… and there’s a third one, you can go somewhere in the middle where there’s some tolerance for the recreational, but you really have a medicinal industry.”

He recalled that St Vincent and the Grenadines deliberately took a cautious approach when it first entered the industry: “Even though Canada went all the way, you wanted to make sure that you test the waters. You don’t want to jeopardise your market; you don’t want to jeopardise anything. So we went into the furthest extreme — purely medicinal, with 100 per cent tolerance for religious purposes.”

By moving early, Caesar said St Vincent and the Grenadines had already captured a wave of investor interest that is no longer available.

“It’s said that the early bird catches the worm, and St Vincent and Grenadines was definitely an early bird. So if there are any worms, if there were worms, we took the worms already. In 2015, 16, 17, you had hundreds of investors flooding your doors, trying to get into this industry. That wave has passed. It means that persons are throwing less capital at the industry.”

The minister also criticised what he described as double standards within the region.

“It is really heart-wrenching to see that some member states of CARICOM are allowing cannabis to come from North America, imported to their countries, and are almost having a closed door to cannabis from other member states with a framework to export. Everyone is silent.”

He reminded delegates that Caribbean agriculture has always relied on cooperation.

Saboto reminded the audience, “The banana industry was built within the Windward Islands on four islands coming together, sharing their experiences, and using a single boat company. So there is going to be a time, and I think that time is now. The message must go out that we can’t just be inward-looking and say, well, I want to do everything myself.”

Looking ahead, Caesar urged governments to think beyond cannabis as a single commodity and to integrate it into a wider health and wellness economy: “We should not go the way of a monocrat. We should advance a modern medicinal wellness industry of which cannabis is only one part.”

He explained that this means building synergies with other natural products like turmeric, moringa, and essential oils, which are already traded globally as health supplements and pharmaceuticals: “If you go into the pharmacy right here just outside of the hospital, you can find turmeric capsules coming from the United States of America, coming from Central America. But we are just growing turmeric and exporting it abroad. If you buy my house on a Saturday morning, I’m taking all my moringa leaves to feed my animals and I am going to the store to buy my moringa capsules.”

To achieve this vision, Caesar also stressed the need to restructure institutions that manage the industry.

“Within our medicinal cannabis authority, we fuse research and development. But the cannabis authority is really a regulator… The next step has to be to free the cannabis authority of the research and development element. Let them run with speed because there are some conflicts that can arise when you are both the regulator and the one advancing the research and development for the same commodities.”

In his view, cannabis should be the anchor for a diversified Caribbean wellness sector, linking agriculture, culture, science, and tourism.

“Cannabis is part of the healing industries we can build in the region, but we must ensure we are adding value, protecting our farmers, and branding our products as Caribbean. This is how we can move from being raw exporters to being leaders in a modern global wellness economy.” – Tracy Moore