Portugal: Flowr prepares a large-scale cultivation site

Canadian company Flowr Corporation has announced that it has received an export permit from Health Canada, enabling it to ship a first batch of clones from its Kelowna facility in Portugal. This batch will be grown in Aljustrel by European company Holigen Holdings Ltd, in which Flowr Copration already holds a 19.8% stake. Toronto-based Flowr Corporation recently announced that it was raising C$43.5 million to acquire approximately 80% of the shares in Holigen Holdings Ltd. that it does not already own, a sign of the company's interest in the European market.

Aljustrel is indeed a fast-growing site, with high-quality production, extraction and manufacturing facilities. The site, which is scheduled to be operational in the third half of 2019, provides for an open-air cultivation area of seven km², with a production capacity of over 50 tons per year.

Flowr has declared that it has implemented an «intensive’ nine-week pest control program, a measure aimed at obtaining the phytosanitary certificates needed to send the clones to Aljustrel. To this end, the company has an exclusive storage protocol to certify that the cannabis clones are free of parasites and pathogens.

Vinay Tolia, CEO of Flowr, stated that «the authorization from Infarmed (the Portuguese National Authority for Medicines and Health Products) to plant cannabis at Aljustrel is a major milestone in the development of this project, a cornerstone of our efforts to serve the global medical cannabis market. Aljustrel is one of the largest outdoor cannabis cultivation facilities in the developed world, and will contribute to the production of large-scale, low-cost cannabis extracts for the production of APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients) and oils for the European medical markets.

However, the therapeutic cannabis market in Portugal has yet to really take off, even though this one has been legal since June 2018. Legalization becomes effective in February 2019, However, no cannabis-based medicine has yet been approved by Infarmed. This large-scale site will probably speed up the process, as will outlets in Europe.