The United Arab Emirates’ first federal move to legalize industrial hemp reads as a bid to create a new, regulated industrial input sector—hemp for textiles, building materials and packaging—while sharply limiting consumer-facing uses.
But embedded in a recently published hemp decree is a more consequential, unresolved question: whether a CBD-production-for-export market could eventually take shape under the new framework.
The decree allows industrial hemp for non-medical sectors including textiles, construction, and paper and packaging, while maintaining strict prohibitions on recreational use and banning hemp in food, dietary supplements, veterinary products and smoking products. Cosmetic uses are also prohibited, except for narrowly defined products made from hemp seeds or stalks, with any further exceptions left to Cabinet discretion.
The decree allows hemp for “legally authorized medical products” (including CBD) dispensed via licensed medical and pharmaceutical channels. The opening for hemp cannabinoids also raises the possibility of exports.
Who is behind it?
While public reporting has not identified specific political sponsors, investors or business groups behind the UAE’s hemp decree, the structure of the framework suggests it emerged from internal economic-planning priorities rather than external lobbying.
The emphasis on industrial inputs, medical manufacturing and export-oriented value chains aligns closely with the interests of federal regulators, state-linked industrial developers and pharmaceutical authorities, rather than farmers or consumer brands.
In that context, hemp appears to be treated less as an agricultural crop than as a regulated raw material to be folded into existing industrial and medical supply chains—consistent with the UAE’s top-down model for developing new, sensitive economic sectors. No specific ministries, officials or investors have been publicly named as champions of the law to date.
Strict regulations
The law permits cultivation, but only under a stringent licensing regime. Import and export of industrial hemp seed require approval from the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment. Applicants must be licensed agricultural companies, seeds must be drawn from approved varieties listed in executive regulations, and planting is restricted to licensed plots in designated zones approved by local authorities.
Those zones must be fenced, monitored and isolated from residential and other agricultural areas. Workers must obtain security clearances, and cultivation must comply with controls set by the National Anti-Narcotics Authority. Producers are barred from using any materials that could push THC above 0.3%, with periodic testing required.
This framework is clearly designed for small numbers of highly supervised operators, not broad participation by farmers or SMEs.
Can CBD fit?
Any CBD export strategy would hinge on how regulators treat hemp flowers, which are the primary source of cannabinoids.
Again, the decree does not explicitly ban flower production, but its emphasis on security, THC controls and narcotics oversight suggests that flower-based cultivation will face the highest scrutiny. If flowers are interpreted primarily through a narcotics lens, CBD extraction may be functionally blocked. If they are framed as inputs for licensed medical manufacturing, limited production could be allowed.
That distinction is not yet resolved, and the law deliberately leaves it to future executive regulations and Cabinet decisions.
Reality check
Even if CBD-for-export is theoretically allowed, agronomic realities remain. Hemp cultivation in the UAE will be constrained by arid conditions, irrigation costs and heat stress, likely limiting production to winter seasons or tightly managed plots.
That reality points away from large-scale biomass farming and toward high-value, low-volume outputs—a profile more consistent with pharmaceutical intermediates than with fiber crops.
From that perspective, CBD extraction for export could make more economic sense than local fiber production, provided regulators permit it. Whether CBD emerges as part of that experiment will depend less on the decree itself than on how narrowly or flexibly its implementing regulations are written.