Investors in medical cannabis projects are focusing on Greece, where a great summer climate and potentially favourable future legislation could help the government deliver on a promise to pull the country out of an economic crisis, according to leading New York based financial software and media company Bloomberg.
"How to Attack Greece’s Persistent Unemployment? Grow Some Weed" – is a new report published by Bloomberg, focusing on the perspectives of growing medical marijuana in Greece and how to tackle the problem of unemployment that has been over 20% in the last five years.
"The Greek economy has been hammered by 10 years of financial crisis, with unemployment topping 20 percent every year since 2012. Now, the government thinks pot growers can help.
A project to cultivate, process and export medical marijuana in Veroia, in the fertile north of the country, shows how Greece sees cannabis as a possible growth industry for the country, which has a warm, dry climate similar to California. New legislation could make the plan a reality as soon as next summer," says the report.
The article in Bloomberg also reports that the Veroia site will create more than 2,000 jobs in the next two to three years, according to Georgios Zafeiris, chief executive officer at Golden Greece Holdings, the company responsible for coordinating the project’s group of 10 investors from countries including Canada, Kazakhstan, Poland and Israel. The first round of investment is seen at 400 million euros ($488 million), rising to more than 1.5 billion euros, and 80 percent of the jobs in areas like cultivation, trading and transport could go to Greeks.
“In Greece, we’re not looking at bringing people in from other areas that have cannabis experience,” said Michael Blady, one of the investors involved in the Veroia project. “We’re going to train as many people as we need and we’re going to start our own culture here,” he said in an interview in Athens.
With the average monthly salaries in Greece sitting at just 586 euros, it is among the lowest in the European Union, so any initiative promising higher-wage jobs is certain to resonate with the government, "Top earners among employees in the legal cannabis industry can bring home $80,000-$100,000 a year," according to Bloomberg.
*Read the full report here: Bloomberg
