So, looks like we are NOT done with South America...is Columbia the future of WEED? Now, the timeline for this major shift in the supply chain may take a decade...but if the writing is on the wall, that means that investment today is more of a trade...and few clients want to guess or trade or bet with their hard-earned money.
From a recent piece in Barrons;
"there used to be more than 180 rose growers along the highway in California’s Monterrey County. Now they’re almost gone. The flower industry went south to the lower-cost country of Colombia. With marijuana legalization in California, Monterrey greenhouses have shifted from growing roses to growing cannabis. But Paul Henderson—whose Salinas-based company Grupo Flor was instrumental in Monterrey marijuana revival—isn’t waiting for North America’s cannabis growers to suffer the same fate as its flower producers. So Grupo Flor is preparing to plant its first crop a couple of hours outside the Colombian city of Cali.
“When the industry starts to move toward commoditization over the next decade,” says Henderson, “Colombia is the only place that makes sense.” An equatorial climate and low-cost, skilled labor give Colombia a clear advantage in agricultural trade. And that makes the nation a threat to North American companies like Canopy Growth ( CGC), Tilray (TLRY) and Aurora Cannabis (ACB). These firms have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building the climate-controlled grow-operations needed to grow weed in cold latitudes.
Most Canadian companies nurse the long-term hope of getting their production costs below two Canadian dollars per gram of cannabis. Colombian producers say their costs will start well below 50 cents a gram—and go down from there.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/colombia-marijuana-production-51559321831