Which Countries Dominate Global Cannabis Exports in 2026

August 24, 2026

Photo by Niklas9416 via Pixabay.

Introduction

Every exporter in the global cannabis trade knows the name that matters most, and it's not one of the countries doing the actual growing. It's Germany. The world's largest legal cannabis market by import volume has become the gravitational center of the entire industry, pulling product from Canada, Portugal, Australia, North Macedonia, and a growing list of other countries all racing to secure a slice of the same demand curve. The numbers are staggering: Germany imported just over 72 tonnes of cannabis flower in 2024, jumped to roughly 201 tonnes in 2025, and is on track to hit 250 tonnes this year. More than 95% of what Germans consume arrives from somewhere else, which means the country has effectively decided it would rather be the biggest buyer in the room than build out its own greenhouse capacity.

Canada was the first mover in this new trade, and for years it dominated the export landscape almost by default. That position is no longer uncontested. Statistics Canada's February 2026 trade data shows total cannabis exports at CA$51.6 million for the month, up 8.7% year-over-year, with the Global Cannabis Exchange projecting a 27% jump for full-year 2026. But behind that headline growth, a quieter shift is underway. Canadian shipments of finished, pharmaceutical-grade medicament products have fallen sharply, dropping from 68 destination countries in 2024 to just 26 in 2025, while raw dried flower exports have more than doubled. Canada is moving more product than ever, but it's increasingly playing the role of bulk commodity supplier rather than finished-goods manufacturer.

Meanwhile Portugal has surged into position as the second-largest cannabis exporter on earth, tripling its export volume year-over-year and leveraging its EU membership, Mediterranean climate, and EU-GMP certified facilities to chase the same German buyers. North Macedonia is tripling its shipments too, though from a smaller base, and Australia is pushing hard despite hitting an INCB-imposed quota ceiling that has forced its producers to compete for limited allocation. Add in Paraguay's first legal hemp shipment to Europe, Morocco's attempt to pull some of its massive illicit hashish trade into the licensed column, and the sudden collapse of Portugal's role as a re-export hub for Canadian flower as German importers now buy direct, and what you get isn't a stable, mature market. It's a scramble, with every producing country racing to capture value before Germany's demand peaks and the competition gets even tighter.

Canada's Export Machine Keeps Growing, But the Mix Is Changing

Statistics Canada's trade data for February 2026 put total cannabis exports at CA$51.6 million for the month, up 8.7% from the same period a year earlier. It's not a dramatic spike, but it's consistent, and consistency is what's been missing from Canada's export story since legalization. The Global Cannabis Exchange (GCX), which tracks trade flows and pricing across licensed producers, is now projecting a 27% jump in Canadian exports for full-year 2026, with Germany and Australia holding steady as the two largest destinations by volume.

The bigger number is the one behind that monthly figure: Canada shipped roughly 240 tonnes of cannabis abroad in 2025, close to double what it moved in 2024. Germany's adult-use and medical market absorbed most of that growth. German pharmacies and distributors now source close to half of all medical cannabis imported into the country from Canadian producers, a share that's grown steadily as German demand has outpaced what EU-based cultivators and importers from Portugal or the Netherlands can supply on their own. For Canadian producers who spent years chasing a domestic market that never grew as fast as promised, Germany has become the release valve.

What's less encouraging, if you look past the headline volume, is what kind of product is actually crossing the border. In 2024, Canadian medicament exports — finished, pharmaceutical-grade cannabis products ready for pharmacy shelves — reached 68 countries. In 2025, that number dropped to just 26. Medicament export value fell 47.1% year-over-year to CA$25.0 million, even as raw dried flower exports more than doubled over the same stretch. Put plainly: Canada is selling less finished product to fewer markets, and making up the difference by shipping unprocessed flower in bulk for someone else to package, extract, or formulate.

That's a meaningful shift in where the value gets captured. A kilogram of finished medicament carries margin from every step of processing, testing, and packaging done on Canadian soil. A kilogram of bulk dried flower sold for reprocessing abroad hands that margin to whoever finishes the job in Frankfurt or Sydney. Canadian producers are moving more product than ever, but they're increasingly playing the role of raw material supplier rather than finished-goods exporter — a trade pattern more typical of a commodity grower than a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and one worth watching as Germany's own domestic cultivation ramps up.

Portugal's Rise -- and a New Squeeze From Germany

Walk into any large-scale grow operation outside Odemira or in the Alentejo region, and you're looking at the physical infrastructure behind a genuinely striking export run. Portugal has settled into position as the second-largest cannabis exporter on earth, trailing only Canada, and it's the clear leader among EU member states — ahead of the Netherlands, ahead of Spain, ahead of every other bloc country still figuring out how to scale medical cultivation under EU-GMP rules. That position didn't happen by accident. Companies including Tilray's Portuguese facility built greenhouse capacity years before most competitors took the EU medical market seriously, betting on Portugal's climate and comparatively straightforward licensing path through Infarmed.

The growth curve tells the story better than any policy summary could. Portuguese cannabis exports roughly tripled year-over-year, climbing from 11,973 kg to 31,188 kg. Zoom out to the full annual figure and it's more than 79 tonnes shipped out of the country last year alone. And 2026 is already ahead of pace — Portugal had cleared the 66-tonne mark by mid-year, putting the country on track to blow past last year's total well before December. This isn't a market finding its footing anymore; it's one that's compounding.

Germany remains the primary buyer, consistent with the broader pattern across European medical cannabis trade, with Spain and Denmark rounding out the top three destinations. That trio makes sense given each country's domestic demand curve: Germany's prescription volumes keep climbing post-legalization reform, Spain's pharmacy-dispensed medical framework is maturing, and Denmark's long-running pilot program has created steady institutional demand.

But there's a complication buried in the numbers, and it points to a structural shift rather than a blip. For years, Portugal functioned as a re-export hub for Canadian dried flower — Canadian growers shipped product to Portuguese facilities, which repackaged and forwarded it into the wider EU market. That arrangement is now collapsing. Canadian dried flower shipments to Portugal fell 86.6% in February 2026, down to just CA$1.67 million, a fraction of what used to move through that corridor.

The reason isn't Portuguese decline — it's German self-sufficiency. Germany has spent the past two years building out its own EU-GMP certified processing and import infrastructure, allowing German importers to bring in Canadian and other third-country flower directly rather than routing it through a Portuguese intermediary. Portugal isn't losing the export game; it's losing its old job as the middleman while gaining ground as a producer in its own right.

Germany: The Import Hub Everyone Is Chasing

Germany's cannabis imports have surged dramatically, nearly tripling from 72 tonnes in 2024 to 201 tonnes in 2025, with projections showing continued growth to 250 tonnes by 2026.

Every exporter conversation in European cannabis eventually circles back to one country that doesn't grow much of anything itself. Germany is the reason Canadian LPs bother filling out EU-GMP paperwork, the reason Portuguese greenhouses keep expanding, and the reason a country like North Macedonia has quietly become a name that pharma-cannabis traders actually recognize. Germany doesn't export cannabis in any meaningful volume — it imports it, in growing quantities, and that appetite is what's actually shaping who wins and loses in the global trade.

The numbers tell the story better than any market forecast deck. Germany brought in a bit more than 72 tonnes of cannabis flower in 2024. In 2025, that figure jumped to roughly 201 tonnes for the full year — nearly a threefold increase in twelve months. Industry projections for 2026 put the country on track to import somewhere around 250 tonnes. That trajectory isn't a blip tied to one policy announcement; it's a curve that's been climbing steadily since the partial legalization changes took effect and medical cannabis prescribing kept expanding alongside it.

What makes Germany unusual as an import hub is how little of its own supply it grows. More than 95% of the cannabis consumed in the country — medical and, increasingly, adjacent recreational-adjacent channels — arrives from somewhere else. Domestic cultivation exists, but it's a rounding error next to what's landing at Frankfurt and other entry points from Canada, Portugal, the Netherlands, Australia and North Macedonia. Germany essentially decided it would rather be the largest buyer in the room than build out the greenhouse capacity to supply itself, and that decision has turned the country into the single biggest pull factor in the entire European cannabis trade.

None of that import flow moves without the Bundesinstitut für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte — BfArM — signing off on it. The federal institute manages Germany's import allocations, sets the quality and testing standards that incoming product has to clear, and effectively decides which international suppliers get meaningful access to the market. For an exporting country, getting a shipment approved by BfArM isn't a formality; it's the gate everything else passes through, and it's why so much of the diplomatic and trade-association energy from Ottawa to Skopje to Lisbon gets spent on maintaining good standing with German regulators.

That's the real competitive story here. Canada has the production scale and EU-GMP-certified facilities. Portugal has cheap Mediterranean sun and proximity inside the EU. North Macedonia has become a low-cost cultivation base building a reputation almost entirely on German contracts. Australia is newer to the game but growing fast, betting that its harvest timing gives it a supply-chain edge. All four are effectively competing for slices of one country's demand curve, which tells you everything about how concentrated this market still is.

The Challengers: North Macedonia and Australia Push for Market Share

Germany's medical cannabis import market has become the proving ground for every country trying to break into legal cannabis trade, and the numbers out of North Macedonia this year are hard to ignore. The Balkan country shipped 8,190 kg of dried flower to Germany in 2025, up from 2,666 kg the year before -- more than tripling volume in twelve months. That's not organic growth, that's a country that built cultivation capacity specifically to chase German demand and then scaled fast once the licenses and buyer relationships were in place. North Macedonia has spent the past several years positioning itself as a low-cost, EU-adjacent production base, and the German figures suggest that strategy is starting to pay off in a real way, not just in press releases about new greenhouse construction.

Australia told a similar growth story, though from a smaller base and with more institutional friction attached. Shipments to Germany more than tripled as well, landing at 4,190 kg for the year. That's meaningful progress for an industry that spent years complaining domestic regulation was too conservative to compete internationally. But Australia's export ambitions just ran into a hard ceiling: in October 2025 the International Narcotics Control Board cut the country's national import quota to 88 tonnes, pointing to utilisation running well below what had been projected. In plain terms, Australia had asked for room to grow a lot more cannabis than it was actually managing to bring to market, and the INCB adjusted the number downward to match reality rather than ambition.

That quota isn't just a bureaucratic footnote -- it's the ceiling every Australian cultivator and exporter operates under. The Office of Drug Control, the federal body that licenses cultivation, production and export of medicinal cannabis, allocates space under that INCB figure to individual license holders. A lower national ceiling means tighter allocation decisions ahead, and it puts pressure on Australian producers to actually convert licensed capacity into shipped product rather than sitting on approvals. Germany's buyers don't care about a company's approved cultivation area; they care about kilograms landing on schedule, and that's where Australia has had to catch up.

Meanwhile the field keeps getting crowded from another direction entirely. Paraguay made its first legal industrial hemp shipment to Europe in February 2025, a modest event on its own but a signal worth watching. It means the pool of countries chasing German and broader EU buyers now stretches from Balkan Europe to Oceania to Paraguay, all competing on price, consistency and regulatory compliance for the same import licenses.

Morocco's Hashish Trade Still Outweighs the Legal Market

Photo via Pexels.

The Rif Mountains have been growing cannabis for kif and hashish since long before anyone was talking about licensed export markets, and that history still dwarfs the paperwork-driven trade taking shape around it. Estimates put Morocco at the top of global cannabis resin production, with the country supplying around 20% of the world's hashish, roughly 40,000 tonnes a year grown across Chefchaouen, Ketama and the surrounding Rif provinces. That figure alone is larger than the entire legal medical cannabis trade of most exporting countries combined.

Almost none of that 40,000 tonnes moves through anything resembling a customs declaration. It travels the way it has for decades: pressed into blocks, moved into Spain, then distributed north through France, the Netherlands and beyond via smuggling networks that predate the modern drug war entirely. Authorities in the region still report Moroccan resin as the dominant form of hashish seized in Western Europe, and the routes through the Rif to the coast are well enough established that they function almost like informal infrastructure, complete with local economies built around cultivation, transport and payoffs along the way.

Morocco's attempt to pull a slice of this into the legal column started with a law creating a licensing agency, the National Agency for the Regulation of Cannabis-Related Activities, aimed at legal cultivation for medical, cosmetic and industrial use. The first tangible export result came in 2024, when a licensed shipment of Moroccan cannabis reached Switzerland, marking the country's debut as a legal exporter rather than purely a source of illicit resin. Officials have floated projections that a fully scaled licensed sector could generate more than $500 million a year, drawing farmers away from the illegal kif economy with contracts, extraction facilities and access to European pharmaceutical buyers.

That $500 million figure, if it ever materializes, would still be a fraction of the value moving through illicit channels every year. Compare the tonnage: Morocco's illicit hashish output measured in tens of thousands of tonnes against the licensed flower and extract volumes coming out of Canada's export program, Portugal's EU-GMP cultivation facilities, or Germany's regulated medical cannabis imports, measured in the hundreds of tonnes at most. These aren't competing segments of one market — they're two cannabis economies running in parallel, with different customers, different price structures and almost no overlap in supply chains. Morocco's legal program may eventually reshape its domestic industry, but the hashish routes into Europe aren't disappearing anytime soon.

Conclusion

If the global cannabis export market has a single defining feature in 2026, it's that everyone is chasing the same customer. Germany's appetite for imported flower and extract has turned the country into the de facto arbiter of which producers succeed and which ones stall out. Canada still leads in total volume, but the story behind that lead is more complicated than the headline numbers suggest. The sharp drop in finished medicament exports and the parallel surge in raw flower shipments mean Canadian producers are capturing less value per kilogram than they used to, effectively handing the processing and packaging margin to buyers and reprocessors in Europe and Australia.

Portugal's rise is the other major plotline, and it's not just about volume. The country has become the EU's homegrown production hub, building on early-mover advantage and a regulatory environment that let companies scale before most competitors even had their licenses in hand. But even Portugal is feeling the squeeze from Germany's direct-buy shift. The old business model of routing Canadian flower through Portuguese repackaging facilities is fading fast, and Portuguese producers are having to compete harder on their own flower quality and extraction capabilities rather than relying on a middleman role that no longer pays the way it used to.

The challengers are moving fast. North Macedonia tripled its German shipments in a single year, proving that a country with low production costs and a straightforward licensing path can punch above its weight. Australia is growing too, though the INCB quota cut to 88 tonnes is a reminder that ambition alone doesn't guarantee market access when international regulators are watching utilization rates. And Morocco, with its 40,000 tonnes of illicit hashish production dwarfing the entire legal export market, is a reminder that the legal trade is still a small fraction of what actually moves through global cannabis supply chains.

What all of this adds up to is a market that's growing rapidly but remains dangerously concentrated. Germany's import decisions shape the fortunes of entire national industries, and any shift in German policy, prescribing patterns, or domestic cultivation capacity could ripple through the export landscape faster than producers can adjust. The countries that survive the coming consolidation will be the ones that don't rely on a single buyer, don't confuse bulk volume with captured value, and don't mistake today's growth curve for a permanent trend. The global cannabis trade is still being built, and the winners aren't decided yet, but the cost of losing is getting higher every year.