OUTCRY AS DAGGA PRICES GO DOWN

 PIGG’S PEAK – It may no longer be accurate to refer to dagga as ‘Swazi Gold’.

From as much as E5 000 per kilogramme or more, dagga prices have dropped to as low as E500 for the same amount.
This is almost 10 times lower than the normal price.

Some lucky growers are able to sell a kilogramme for about E1 200.
Some of the dagga farmers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the prices had dropped because the illicit herb was now being grown everywhere in the country.

Attributed

This was attributed to the ongoing hype about legalisation of the herb.
Though it is still illegal to grow dagga in Eswatini, some of the growers alleged that many people who were previously not interested in growing it had now joined the ‘bandwagon’.

They said in the past, the high quality dagga was grown around northern Hhohho but that this was no longer the case.
“You can now find a lot of dagga being grown even in Siteki,” they said.
During a recent destruction of the illegal herb, the Royal Eswatini Police Service (REPS), through its Narcotics and Anti-Drug Unit, had shown that there was an increase in dagga cultivation in the Lubombo Region.

No reason was given for this sudden increase.
The growers complained that many people were now stranded with their dagga which they could not sell because the market was seemingly saturated.
They further revealed that even low quality dagga which contains seeds, was now flooding the market.

High quality dagga grown mainly near riverbanks does not have seeds as it is cultivated using high grade imported seeds.
According to one of the growers, dagga was fetching as much as E5 per gramme meaning that it could fetch as much as E5 000 per kilogramme.
“This was possible if you could get agood market,” he said.
However, he said some of the buyers mainly from South Africa (SA), Botswana and Tanzania, were able to negotiate good prices.

Selling

He said this was not the case anymore as it seemed there was so much dagga that people were selling to get rid of it.
“Selling it for E500 is like throwing it away,” he said.
In the past, the farmers said dagga destruction by the police would help boost the prices.

Since the beginning of the year, hundreds of hectares of dagga, weighing thousands of kilogrammes, had been destroyed.
Despite this, there is still a lot of dagga, according to some of the farmers, who complained that this was then resulting in too much dagga on the market, leading to the plummeting of the prices.

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