Vanuatu's Two Plants: Kava's Law, Cannabis's Void

August 21, 2026

Photo by Dominik Gryzbon via Pexels.

Introduction

The kava shell is the first thing a visitor to Vanuatu's Parliament might notice. Before any debate begins, before any bill is read, a shell is passed around. The same thing happens when a foreign ambassador presents credentials. The ritual is not decorative. It signals authority, mutual obligation, and the right to speak in a gathering. That ritual sits at the heart of how Vanuatu governs itself, and the plant at the centre of it carries a weight that no other crop can easily borrow.

Kava has been cultivated in northern Vanuatu for roughly three thousand years. Genetic studies point to Pentecost, Ambae or Maewo as the site of its original domestication, and the plant's cultivated forms do not produce viable seed. Every kava plant in every nakamal garden today is a cutting descended from that ancient selection process. That kind of agricultural lineage does not fade quickly, and it helps explain why kava enjoys a legal and cultural status that cannabis, for all its growing regional acceptance, simply does not share.

The contrast is stark. Kava is regulated, taxed, exported, and consumed openly through a system that the government has spent decades refining. Cannabis, by contrast, remains governed by the Dangerous Drugs Act, CAP 12, a colonial-era statute that prohibits cultivation outright and carries penalties as high as 20 years in prison. Parliament passed a Medical Cannabis and Industrial Hemp Act in 2021, and regulations finally followed in early 2023, but nearly five years later the industry remains largely theoretical. Licences have been approved, but none have been issued. No seeds have been planted. No product has been exported.

What makes Vanuatu's case unusual is not the delay. Many small island states have struggled to turn cannabis legislation into operational industries. What makes it unusual is the proximity of kava, a plant that does everything cannabis is trying to do, and does it better, with deeper institutional support and a cultural foundation that no statute alone can replicate. This article looks at how Vanuatu built its kava framework over decades, why cannabis remains stuck in legal limbo, and what the gap between the two plants says about the country's approach to drug policy, custom, and economic development.

Kava's 3,000-Year Head Start

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Long before anyone in Port Vila was arguing about how to regulate cannabis, Ni-Vanuatu communities had already spent three millennia figuring out how to grow, process, and govern a psychoactive plant. Genetic studies tracing the ancestry of Piper methysticum point to northern Vanuatu, likely around the islands of Pentecost, Ambae or Maewo, as the site of its original domestication roughly 3,000 years ago. Kava doesn't produce viable seed in its cultivated forms, which means every plant in every nakamal garden today is a cutting descended from that ancient selection process. That's an extraordinary agricultural lineage, and it's one reason kava carries a legal and cultural weight that no newly arrived plant, cannabis included, can simply borrow.

That weight shows up in the machinery of the state itself. Sessions of Vanuatu's Parliament open with the passing of a kava shell, and when foreign ambassadors present credentials or pay official visits, they're welcomed the same way, drinking from a coconut shell rather than shaking hands over a briefing document. This isn't ceremonial garnish tacked onto Western-style governance. It's a survival of chiefly protocol in which sharing kava signals recognized authority, mutual obligation, and the right to speak in a gathering. A plant that sits inside the ritual vocabulary of the nation's highest institutions is never going to be treated as a mere commodity to be taxed and forgotten.

The state backs that cultural centrality with plain economic policy. A nakamal, the open-air bar where kava is mixed and drunk each evening, needs only a basic business license to operate, and that license runs about VT 20 a year, a sum so small it barely registers on a family budget. Imported alcohol, by contrast, is hit with substantial import duties and excise taxes, a combination that makes a case of beer or bottle of spirits noticeably pricier than a bowl of kava at the local nakamal. That's not an accident of unrelated tax schedules; it's a fiscal architecture that nudges everyday drinking toward the indigenous plant and away from imported liquor, without ever needing to say so explicitly in the statute.

Where the law does get explicit is in the Kava Act No. 7 of 2002, which sets out cultivation and sale rules with real teeth. It requires organic-only growing methods, no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, and it restricts domestic retail sale to noble kava varieties, the milder, traditionally consumed cultivars, while keeping the harsher tudei strains out of local nakamals due to their association with prolonged intoxication and adverse effects. Cannabis, still governed by inherited colonial-era prohibition language, has no equivalent framework anywhere close to that level of institutional care.

Cannabis Under a Colonial-Era Statute

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The relevant law here is the Dangerous Drugs Act, CAP 12, and it doesn't leave much room for interpretation. The statute states that cultivation of any plant of the genus Cannabis shall be prohibited, full stop. There's no clause carving out small household plots, no religious or ceremonial exemption, no threshold for personal versus commercial quantities written into the prohibition itself. Compare that to how kava is handled -- grown, sold, and consumed openly through a recognized commercial and customary system -- and the contrast is stark. Cannabis simply never received that kind of statutory accommodation.

On paper, the penalties are severe. CAP 12 allows for fines running as high as VT 100 million (roughly USD 830,000 at typical exchange rates) and prison terms of up to 20 years for drug offenses under the Act. Those numbers sit at the extreme end of what you'll find in any Pacific Island jurisdiction's drug legislation, and they were clearly drafted with an eye toward deterring large-scale trafficking rather than a farmer growing a few plants behind a garden fence in Efate or Santo.

The gap between what's written and what actually happens in a Port Vila courtroom is wide. Magistrates dealing with small personal-use cases -- a handful of plants, a small bag of dried leaf -- routinely impose a fine rather than send someone to prison. Custodial sentences tend to get reserved for cases involving larger cultivation operations, repeat offending, or evidence of intent to supply. It's a pattern familiar from other common-law jurisdictions inherited from British administration: harsh maximum penalties sitting on the books while sentencing practice, guided by proportionality principles, does most of the real work of shaping outcomes.

What cannabis lacks entirely is any structural parallel to how kava operates. There's no licensed retail equivalent to a nakamal, no customary protocol governing who can grow it or share it, no chiefly or community authority recognized in law as having a say over its use. Kava carries centuries of embedded social practice that predates any statute and that the state has largely worked around rather than against. Cannabis has none of that legal scaffolding -- it exists in Vanuatu's law purely as a controlled substance, full stop, with no cultural or ceremonial status attached to it anywhere in the statute books.

That's partly a matter of history. CAP 12's basic structure predates independence in 1980, inherited largely intact from the arrangements administered jointly by Britain and France during the New Hebrides condominium period. It reflects a mid-twentieth-century international drug-control template imposed from outside rather than something negotiated through ni-Vanuatu custom or local legislative debate. Successive governments since independence have kept that framework largely in place, revisiting sentencing and enforcement practice more than the underlying prohibition itself.

The 2021 Medical Cannabis and Industrial Hemp Act

Parliament in Port Vila passed the Medical Cannabis and Industrial Hemp Act in 2021, but the legislation sat largely dormant for two years before it had any teeth. The regulations needed to actually license growers, set fees, and define cultivation zones weren't signed off until February 2023. That gap mattered — a law on the books without implementing rules is mostly a statement of intent, and in those two years Vanuatu had a cannabis statute that couldn't yet issue a single permit, while customary use and small-scale growing continued exactly as it always had under village authority rather than statute.

Once the regulations landed, the structure of the licensing scheme became clearer. Moses Amos, who chaired the committee overseeing the framework, explained that licenses are issued for a 10-year term. After that decade runs out, the exclusivity ends — any ni-Vanuatu citizen would then be free to enter the industry without needing to go through the same licensing gate that current operators had to clear. It's a deliberate sunset built into the law, seemingly meant to prevent the first wave of license-holders, many of them foreign-backed, from locking up the sector permanently.

That foreign involvement is itself tightly conditioned. Overseas investors seeking a license must demonstrate at least 10 years of prior experience in the cannabis or hemp industry elsewhere before Vanuatu will consider them qualified. In practice this filters out speculative first-timers chasing a new market and favors companies that already have cultivation or processing track records abroad. At least two medical cannabis licenses and three industrial hemp licenses were made available under the initial rollout, each carrying an annual fee of US$81,300 — a figure steep enough that it effectively rules out most local smallholders from participating directly, at least for now.

Geography further narrows who can grow what. Industrial hemp cultivation is restricted to five islands — Efate, Santo, Malekula, Tanna, and Erromango — while medical cannabis licenses are confined to just three: Efate, Santo, and Malekula. The split suggests regulators wanted hemp, seen as lower-risk and non-psychoactive in its intended form, spread across a wider footprint, while keeping the more tightly controlled medical cannabis sector concentrated on the more developed, better-monitored islands.

None of this passed without friction. The Act moved through Parliament without the kind of public consultation process Vanuatu communities generally expect before major legislation touching land and custom. Church leaders objected once they realized how far along the law was before they'd had any input, and officials outside the capital raised similar concerns. Sam Naiu, the agricultural officer for Tafea province, was blunt about the risk of abuse he saw in a law drafted quickly and centrally, then handed down to islands where kava and informal cannabis growing already coexist under customary rules nobody in Port Vila had consulted.

Licensed on Paper, Stalled in Practice

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Vanuatu's Parliament passed legislation permitting medicinal cannabis cultivation back in 2021, which on paper put the archipelago in the same company as regional neighbors experimenting with export-oriented cannabis programs. Four companies had cleared the licensing process by August 2023, according to figures confirmed under then-Agriculture Minister Nako Natuman. That sounds like momentum. It wasn't. Those four licences sat unissued, waiting on a minister's signature and a bureaucratic apparatus that, three years after the law passed, still hadn't worked out how a licensed grower would actually get product into the ground.

The gap became impossible to paper over by 2024. Timothy Tumukon, Director General of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Forestry, Fisheries and Biosecurity (MALFB), said plainly that the year produced no movement at all on the operational side of the industry -- no importing of seeds or clones, no planting, no processing infrastructure, no export shipments. This wasn't a case of one stalled applicant or a single administrative bottleneck. The entire pipeline, from seed to sale, remained theoretical.

The root problem is structural rather than personal. Parliament approved a framework law, but a framework law isn't a functioning regulatory system. Vanuatu never finished the secondary layer of policy, sector strategy, and detailed regulation that turns a licence into something a business can operate under. Without that detail spelled out, licensed companies couldn't even open commercial bank accounts, because financial institutions had no compliance basis for treating a cannabis licence as a legitimate, bankable asset. A company holding an approved licence but unable to bank funds, import inputs, or point to an approved cultivation protocol is a company that exists mostly in correspondence with the ministry.

Government officials have since recalibrated expectations rather than the timeline itself. The current target, as described by MALFB, is early operations by the first quarter of 2026 -- and officials have been notably modest about what that phrase means, framing success as simply seeing visible signs of activity on the ground rather than claiming a mature, revenue-generating export industry. That's a telling shift in ambition: from launching an industry to hoping something visibly happens at all.

As of current reporting, even that scaled-down benchmark remains unmet. No licensed cultivation site, processing facility, or export shipment has materialized. The licences exist; the industry, in any practical sense, still doesn't.

Two Plants, One Country, No Middle Ground

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Walk through Port Vila and you'll pass at least a dozen nakamals before lunch, each licensed, each selling a product graded by variety and potency under rules the government has spent twenty years refining. Kava in Vanuatu isn't just tolerated -- it's institutionally mapped. The Vanuatu Kaviculture Act and the work of bodies like the Vanuatu Kava Society and the Department of Industry have built out a system that classifies cultivars (noble versus tudei, the two-day kava associated with unpleasant after-effects), sets export-grade standards recognized by buyers in the US and EU, and lets a nakamal operator get licensed with minimal friction. That infrastructure didn't appear overnight. It's the product of a deliberate, decades-long push to protect kava as both a custom good and a commodity, backed by farmers, chiefs, and successive governments who treated the plant as core to national identity and increasingly to export earnings.

Cannabis occupies the opposite end of the spectrum, and the distance between the two is almost hard to overstate. Under the Dangerous Drugs Act, cannabis remains a controlled substance -- growing it, possessing it, or using it in any customary or personal context is a criminal offense, full stop. There's no carve-out for the plant's documented presence in ni-Vanuatu village life going back generations, no medical access scheme, no permit pathway for a farmer who wants to grow a few plants the way his grandfather might have. In 2020, parliament amended the law to allow cannabis cultivation for export under a licensing regime aimed at medicinal and industrial markets, a move pitched as an economic diversification play alongside kava and copra. But nearly five years on, that export window remains largely theoretical. No fully operational commercial license has moved product to a real overseas buyer, the regulatory guidance for growers is thin, and the agency oversight promised at the time of the amendment hasn't matured into anything resembling the Kava Society's operational depth. Cannabis, in short, is legal to invest in and illegal to actually touch -- a gap that leaves it administratively inert even where the statute technically opened a door.

What's notably absent is any real movement to close that gap the way kava's gap was closed. There's no bill on record, no chiefly council petition, no NGO campaign arguing that cannabis grown for personal or ceremonial use deserves the kind of customary recognition kava enjoys. The silence is itself informative. Kava's protections trace back to its unbroken status as a custom good tied to specific islands, chiefly authority, and daily social life -- something colonial administrations and later independent governments never seriously tried to suppress. Cannabis carries no equivalent institutional memory in Vanuatu's legal imagination, whatever its actual presence in gardens and villages might be. The result is a plant policy landscape shaped less by any comparative read of the two substances' effects than by which one arrived with generations of custom law already built around it, and which one didn't.

Conclusion

Vanuatu's cannabis experiment is not a failure, not yet, but it is also not an industry. Four companies cleared the licensing process by August 2023, but those licences sat unissued, waiting on signatures and bureaucratic machinery that still had not worked out how a licensed grower would actually get product into the ground. The year 2024 produced no movement at all, according to the Director General of the Ministry of Agriculture. No seeds or clones were imported. No planting took place. No processing infrastructure was built. No export shipments were made. The current target is early operations by the first quarter of 2026, but even that modest benchmark remains unmet as of current reporting.

The root problem is structural. Parliament approved a framework law, but a framework law is not a functioning regulatory system. Vanuatu never finished the secondary layer of policy and detailed regulation that turns a licence into something a business can operate under. Without that detail, licensed companies could not even open commercial bank accounts, because financial institutions had no compliance basis for treating a cannabis licence as a legitimate asset. A company holding an approved licence but unable to bank funds, import inputs, or point to an approved cultivation protocol is a company that exists mostly in correspondence with the ministry.

Kava shows what a functional system looks like. The Vanuatu Kaviculture Act and the work of bodies like the Vanuatu Kava Society have built out an infrastructure that classifies cultivars, sets export-grade standards recognised by buyers in the US and EU, and lets a nakamal operator get licensed with minimal friction. That infrastructure did not appear overnight. It is the product of a deliberate, decades-long push to protect kava as both a custom good and a commodity, backed by farmers, chiefs, and successive governments who treated the plant as core to national identity.

Cannabis occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. Under the Dangerous Drugs Act, it remains a controlled substance, full stop. There is no carve-out for the plant's documented presence in ni-Vanuatu village life going back generations, no medical access scheme, no permit pathway for a farmer who wants to grow a few plants the way his grandfather might have. The 2021 Act opened a door for export, but nearly five years on, that door remains mostly theoretical. What is notably absent is any real movement to close the gap the way kava's gap was closed. There is no bill on record, no chiefly council petition, no NGO campaign arguing that cannabis grown for personal or ceremonial use deserves the kind of customary recognition kava enjoys.

The silence is itself informative. Kava's protections trace back to its unbroken status as a custom good tied to specific islands, chiefly authority, and daily social life. Colonial administrations and later independent governments never seriously tried to suppress it. Cannabis carries no equivalent institutional memory in Vanuatu's legal imagination, whatever its actual presence in gardens and villages might be. The result is a plant policy landscape shaped less by any comparative read of the two substances' effects than by which one arrived with generations of custom law already built around it, and which one did not.

Whether Vanuatu can eventually close that gap remains an open question. The medical cannabis and hemp framework exists on paper, and the government has signalled that it wants to see activity on the ground. But activity requires more than licences. It requires clarity, infrastructure, and a recognition that a plant with no cultural anchor in the statute books will not suddenly behave like one that has been part of national governance for three millennia. Kava took three thousand years to earn its place. Cannabis may not have that kind of time, but it could learn something from the journey.