Philippines' Hemp Ban Collides With Highland Farming in Ifugao, Nueva Vizcaya

October 4, 2026

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Search long enough and you'll find the claim floating around: that farmers from the Bugkalot (Ilongot) and Ifugao communities in northern Luzon have brought a hemp exemption case before the Philippines' Dangerous Drugs Board. As of this writing, there's no documented bill, resolution, or filing that confirms any such case exists. That's worth saying plainly up front, because the story that does exist underneath the rumor is real and arguably more useful to understand than the rumor itself.

Philippine law makes no distinction between industrial hemp and the marijuana sold on a street corner in Manila. Under Republic Act 9165, Cannabis sativa is Cannabis sativa, whether it's bred for fiber and tests at 0.3% THC or bred for potency and tests at 20%. That single fact is the legal backdrop any real exemption debate would have to confront, and it's why the geography keeps surfacing in these conversations. The Cordillera highlands and the rugged terrain of Nueva Vizcaya, long tied to Ifugao and Bugkalot communities respectively, are also where Philippine drug enforcement already concentrates much of its domestic cannabis eradication work. There is a real, pending piece of legislation touching cannabis policy right now, House Bill 9428, but it's built around medical access and patient rights, not an indigenous carve-out for hemp farming. Separating what's actually in motion from what's circulating as rumor is the whole point of this piece.

What RA 9165 Actually Says About Hemp

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Republic Act 9165, the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002, is the law that governs every cannabis conversation in the Philippines, and it was written without any concept of industrial hemp as a separate category. The statute defines marijuana broadly enough to capture the entire Cannabis sativa species, meaning a fiber variety grown for rope or textile has the same legal status as a high-THC strain grown for smoking. There's no THC threshold anywhere in the text that would let a grower claim their crop falls below a psychoactive cutoff, because the law doesn't recognize that such a cutoff could matter.

That has real consequences for anyone caught cultivating the plant, regardless of intent or end use. Penalties under RA 9165 for cultivation run from twelve years and one day up to life imprisonment, with fines that can reach millions of pesos depending on the quantity involved. A farmer growing hemp for seed oil or fiber faces the identical charge, and the identical sentencing range, as someone growing for recreational sale. Intent doesn't factor into the classification the way it does in jurisdictions that have built a legal lane for low-THC cultivars.

This puts the Philippines well behind several of its neighbors on this specific question. Thailand decriminalized cannabis cultivation in 2022 and has since built out a licensing system, however contested its details remain. Numerous US states have maintained separate hemp statutes since the 2018 federal Farm Bill drew a bright line at 0.3% THC. The Philippines has no equivalent structure at all -- no licensing authority, no THC-based legal threshold, no registered hemp growers anywhere in the country. Any community, indigenous or otherwise, that wanted to cultivate hemp legally would be starting from a blank legal slate. That's not a matter the Dangerous Drugs Board could resolve on its own through administrative rulemaking; it would require Congress to amend the statute itself, since the dangerous-drug classification is written directly into the law rather than left to agency discretion.

Why the Cordillera and Nueva Vizcaya Terrain Keeps Coming Up

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Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency data has consistently placed marijuana as the second most commonly used illicit drug nationally, trailing only methamphetamine (known locally as shabu). Unlike shabu, which largely moves through organized trafficking networks and ports, most domestically grown marijuana in the Philippines supplies local and regional consumption rather than international export. That distinction matters for where cultivation actually happens: it tends to cluster in remote, mountainous terrain across Luzon and parts of Mindanao, places where dense canopy cover, difficult road access, and thin law enforcement presence make eradication operations slow and resource-intensive.

Ifugao province sits inside the Cordillera Administrative Region, a part of northern Luzon better known internationally for the Banaue and Batad rice terraces, carved into mountainsides over centuries and recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. That same terracing geography -- steep slopes, limited road networks, agricultural plots tucked into valleys -- creates exactly the kind of low-visibility terrain that has historically turned up in PDEA eradication reports elsewhere in the Cordillera. Nueva Vizcaya, along with adjoining stretches of Quezon province, carries a similar profile: rugged, forested, and long associated with Bugkalot (Ilongot) settlement areas going back generations.

None of that amounts to documentation that either the Ifugao or Bugkalot communities specifically are cultivating cannabis, commercially or otherwise, let alone that either has petitioned for an exemption. The overlap between where these communities live and where Philippine authorities have found cannabis cultivation in the past is geographic and circumstantial -- the kind of pattern that makes a rumor plausible-sounding without making it true. It does explain, though, why if a genuine local dispute over hemp and indigenous farming rights were ever going to surface, this is roughly the terrain where you'd expect it to start.

The Dangerous Drugs Board and Who's Actually in Charge

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The Dangerous Drugs Board is the Philippines' policy-setting body for drug law, distinct from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, which handles the operational side -- raids, arrests, eradication of cultivated plots. The DDB sets classification and policy; PDEA executes it in the field. As of recent reporting, the DDB is chaired by Secretary Oscar F. Valenzuela, operating under the Office of the President, with the board's membership drawing from multiple cabinet-level agencies alongside law enforcement and health representatives.

That structure matters a great deal when evaluating any claim about an active exemption debate, because the DDB simply doesn't have the unilateral authority to carve hemp out of RA 9165's dangerous-drug classification. The statute itself defines marijuana to include the full Cannabis sativa species -- that's legislative text, not agency policy the board could reinterpret through a resolution or memorandum. Changing it would require an act of Congress, the same way any amendment to a penal statute would.

As of now, no pending legislation has proposed splitting industrial hemp from marijuana under Philippine law. There's no bill number, no committee hearing, no DDB resolution on record addressing a hemp carve-out for farming communities in the Cordillera, Nueva Vizcaya, or anywhere else. That absence is itself informative. If the Bugkalot-Ifugao hemp exemption debate were a live legislative matter, it would leave a paper trail -- a bill filed in the House or Senate, committee referral, floor debate, maybe a DDB public statement responding to it. None of that currently exists in the public record, which is the clearest signal available that the debate, at least in the form being described, hasn't actually reached the Board or Congress yet.

HB 9428: The Real Cannabis Bill in Play

The cannabis bill that is genuinely moving through the Philippine legislative process right now is House Bill 9428, and it has nothing to do with hemp farming or indigenous agricultural exemptions. Its focus is medical cannabis access -- compassionate use provisions for patients, a right-of-access framework, and expanded funding for research into cannabis's medicinal applications. It's the kind of bill that shows up in jurisdictions working through how to legalize cannabis for patients without touching recreational or industrial policy at all.

Structurally, HB 9428 proposes a Medical Cannabis Advisory Committee to oversee implementation, and notably, the bill writes in the DDB Chairman as a permanent member of that committee rather than leaving oversight entirely to a new body. PDEA and the DDB would both retain monitoring roles under the proposed framework -- not purely enforcement functions, but ongoing oversight of how medical cannabis programs operate if the bill passes. That's a meaningful design choice: it keeps the existing drug-control apparatus embedded in the new system rather than creating a parallel regulatory track from scratch.

The reason this bill matters to the hemp exemption question is mostly about what it isn't. It's easy for public discussion to blur medical cannabis legislation and industrial hemp policy together, since both involve loosening the current blanket prohibition in some way. But HB 9428 addresses patient access to cannabis-derived treatment, not fiber or seed cultivation rights for farming communities, and it says nothing about THC thresholds, hemp licensing, or ancestral domain agriculture. What it does demonstrate is that cannabis policy in the Philippines is genuinely in motion -- lawmakers are actively debating how far to extend legal access -- just not along the specific axis that the Bugkalot-Ifugao rumor describes. Anyone citing HB 9428 as evidence of a hemp exemption debate is misreading what the bill actually does.

What a Real Indigenous Exemption Claim Would Need to Show

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If a real indigenous hemp exemption case were working its way through Philippine institutions, there's a specific body that would almost certainly be involved early: the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP). The NCIP is the agency tasked with recognizing and protecting ancestral domain claims, and it's the natural venue for any formal argument that a customary agricultural practice deserves legal protection distinct from general national law.

The legal hook for that kind of argument would be the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act of 1997, RA 8371, which protects customary land use within recognized ancestral domains and gives indigenous cultural communities a degree of self-governance over how those lands are used. IPRA is a genuinely strong piece of legislation on paper, but it has never, as far as documented cases show, been tested directly against RA 9165's blanket dangerous-drug classification in a cannabis cultivation dispute. There's no precedent on record where an ancestral domain claim was weighed against the Dangerous Drugs Act specifically over hemp or marijuana cultivation, which means nobody actually knows how that collision would play out in Philippine courts or administrative bodies.

For readers trying to verify a story like this one, the due diligence is straightforward even if it takes some digging: check DDB press releases directly, search Philippine News Agency wire coverage for any filing or statement, and look at regional outlets based in Baguio or elsewhere in the Cordillera, since local press tends to catch these disputes well before national media does. A named bill number, a DDB resolution with a date and reference number, or an NCIP filing with a case number -- any of those would turn this from rumor into reportable fact. Until one surfaces, the responsible move is treating the Bugkalot-Ifugao hemp exemption claim as unverified. That's not a dismissal of indigenous communities' stake in this issue -- it's the same standard any specific policy claim should meet before being repeated as established fact, regardless of which community it's attached to.

Until somebody can point to a named bill, a dated DDB resolution, or an NCIP case filing, the Bugkalot-Ifugao hemp exemption story belongs in the unconfirmed-claim pile, not the reported-fact pile. That's not a knock on the communities involved -- it's just where the evidence currently sits.

What's real, and worth tracking regardless of how this particular rumor shakes out, is the legal gap underneath it. Philippine law still has no mechanism to tell fiber hemp apart from psychoactive marijuana, which means every highland farming community in the Cordillera and Nueva Vizcaya lives with a kind of permanent legal ambiguity around what they can and can't grow, whatever their actual intentions. That gap doesn't close on its own, and it won't close through a DDB memo either.

Any real fix runs through Congress, where RA 9165 would need actual amendment, and likely through NCIP channels if ancestral domain rights end up part of the argument. The Dangerous Drugs Board can chair committees and set enforcement policy, but it can't rewrite a penal statute on its own authority. That structural fact is the thing worth watching for -- not this week's headline, but whether a bill number, a resolution, or a filing eventually shows up to back it.