Iberia Faces Strategic Headwinds as Europe’s Prime Cannabis Industrial Hub

For five years, the European cannabis industry has looked to Iberia for reliable, compliant and affordable medical supply. Today, Spain and Portugal jointly export close to 50 tonnes of medical cannabis flower each year — roughly 15% of globally traded volumes,surpassed only by Canada in volume of trade. Both countries have become industrially mature and internationally integrated, but domestically constrained by some of Europe’s most restrictive patient-access frameworks.

What has emerged is an ecosystem that powers Europe’s medical cannabis market while largely excluding Iberian patients themselves. This article examines how the peninsula became an essential node in global supply chains, why its industrial strength is not yet matched by internal legitimacy, and what would be required to transform Iberia from an export corridor into a true European leader.

Iberia’s Rise as Europe’s Processing and Export Hub

No region in Europe combines scale, diversification and pharmaceutical compliance like Iberia. Despite multiple European nations from the Netherlands, to Denmark and Macedonia developing pharmaceutical-grade cannabis production, Iberia forms Europe’s only fully integrated value chain: genetics development; low-cost GACP cultivation; EU-GMP manufacturing; irradiation; analytics; formulation; packaging; clinical trials and cross-border distribution.

This tight interdependence has turned Iberia into the backbone of Europe’s medical cannabis supply from Europea position reinforced by Germany’s explosive import growth — from 32,5 tonnes in 2023 to more than 160 tonnes expected in 2025.A significant fraction of those volumes, both direct and indirect, pass through Portuguese or Spanish facilities before reaching German pharmacies.

Portugal's rapid ascent from 709 kg of exports in 2019 to more than 33 tonnes in the first eight months of 2025reflects a deliberate strategy built on natural advantages, a skilled workforce and a flexible but rigorous regulatory framework. INFARMED’s licensing model allows GACP cultivation to feed EU-GMP manufacturing chainsenabling Portugal to operate as both a primary producer and a conversion hub for international supply. Dozens of licensed sites — 37 cultivators, 24 manufacturers, and nearly 50 exporters — have turned the country into Europe’s largest cannabis processing zone outside Germany.

The map of companies licensed in Portugal by Infarmed as of March 20, 2025, which has since undergone changes.

Spain’s trajectory has been different but equally strategic: while Portugal has benefited from licensing agility, Spain’s industrial footprint has—until now—been concentrated in a handful of large, high-specification pharmaceutical projects. With EU-GMP mandatory across the full chainSpanish operators have built some of Europe’s most sophisticated manufacturing, sterilisation and quality-control infrastructures. Facilities such as Medalchemy (Curaleaf) or Ionisos have become indispensable to continental supply chains, processing not only Spanish-grown flower but also imports from Portugal and elsewhere. According to the latest Spanish Cannabis Market Report, an 22 tonnes authorized for export from Spain so far this year,only close to 8 tonnes were domestically cultivated; the remainder underwent extraction, sterilization or analytical release in Spanish plants before heading back to Portugal or toward Germany, the UK or Switzerland.

But the model is not without fragility. Portugal’s recent shift in reporting procedures created an unexpected bottleneck: several processors are now holding tonnes in inventories of imported flower awaiting export permits. INFARMED’s public assertion that “a majority” of Portuguese exports originate in domestic production sits uneasily with the visible volume of Canadian and other foreign material in warehouses. Meanwhile, Spain’s strict EU-GMP requirements limit its flexibility for reprocessing at the scale Portugal handles, placing the peninsula’s two halves in structurally different — albeit complementary — positions. Five of Spain’s nine commercially active licence holders specialise in geneticswith Portuguese cultivators as key clients. Meanwhile, Portugal’s large GACP and EU-GMP throughput provides inputs for high-value processors in both countries.

Iberia has become Europe’s processing center a pharmaceutical corridor through which global cannabis flows before reaching the continent’s primary demand markets

Across Portugal and Spain, the result is clear: Iberia has become Europe’s processing center a pharmaceutical corridor through which global cannabis flows before reaching the continent’s primary demand markets of Germany, the UK and Poland.

The Domestic Paradox: Industrial Strength, Minimal Access for Patients

The Iberian model’s greatest contradiction is internal. While Spain and Portugal have built one of the most sophisticated cannabis manufacturing ecosystems in the world, domestic medical access remains among the weakest in Europe. Portugal, despite its export boom, dispensed only 757 prescription packages in the first nine months of 2024 — a 33% intersemestral decline.

Professional surveys show strong theoretical support among clinicians, with nearly 80% of healthcare professionals recognising therapeutic utility, yet prescribing remains hampered by administrative burdens, lack of training and absence of reimbursement. Patients face a fragmented system without integrated networks linking producers, prescribers and pharmacies. This disconnect between industrial success and limited patient uptake leaves Portugal dependent on foreign demand cycles and exposed to regulatory or logistical shocks.

Spain’s situation is even more restrictive. Royal Decree 903/2025 finally legalised medical cannabis but confined it to hospital-only dispensing and extract-based formulations. Community pharmacies cannot yet dispense, primary care cannot prescribe, and inhalable formats — including medical flower — remain excluded. Despite up to 8 million Spaniards who could potentially benefit from cannabinoid therapies and over more than 250.000 are already undergoing treatment with cannabinoids,only a small fraction is expected to gain legal access in the first years of implementation. Meanwhile, Spain will export this year close to 10 tonnes of EU-GMP-certified flower and formulations to treat patients in the UK and Germany.

Both systems therefore share a core vulnerability: they are export markets first, medical-access markets second. This asymmetry undermines long-term competitiveness, because countries without domestic clinical pipelines cannot generate real-world evidence, clinician familiarity, or innovation feedback loops — the ingredients that ultimately determine global pharmaceutical leadership.

Recent export bottlenecks in Portugal, regulatory uncertainty in Germany, and the entry of new competitors reveal the dangers of an excessively outsourced industrial model.

The volatility of international trade amplifies this risk. Portugal’s recent export bottlenecks, Germany’s regulatory uncertainty around telemedicine and mail-order models, and the entry of new competitors such as Thailand and CzechiaThese findings reveal the dangers of an excessively outsourced industrial model. A change in the dynamics of German imports or a compliance scandal at an Iberian facility could disrupt significant portions of the peninsula's revenue.

What Iberia lacks is a domestic anchor bridging industrial power with clinical legitimacy.

From Export Platform to European Leader

If Spain and Portugal want to consolidate their position as Europe’s dominant cannabis bloc, the next phase must extend beyond reprocessing and export throughput. A model built exclusively on supplying foreign markets is inherently vulnerable; a model that combines exports with domestic clinical leadership becomes strategically unassailable.

For Portugal, this means streamlining prescription pathwaysintegrating training modules into medical curricula, establishing reimbursement for key indications, and linking producers more directly to pharmacies and prescribers. A credible domestic market — even a modest one — would reduce dependence on German procurement cycles and allow Portuguese companies to innovate in formulations, genetics and clinical applications.

For Spain, progress requires fully implementing and moving beyond the narrow contours of RD 903/2025. Enabling community pharmacy dispensing,expanding indications and dosage forms through pharmacopoeia monographs, authorising experimental access programmes for flower and inhalable formats, and deploying telepharmacy services would begin to bridge the gap between industrial and clinical spheres. Spain has the capacity to become a reference country for clinical research, but only if political structures allow researchers to conduct experiments and observational studies at scale.

The opportunity is clear. Portugal and Spain already export more cannabis than any region in the world except for Canada. They possess unmatched climate advantages, a deep pool of agricultural and pharmaceutical talent, and an integrated industrial base spanning genetics to EU-GMP manufacturing. What they lack is institutional alignment to convert this industrial muscle into clinical adoption, innovation leadership and regulatory influence.

If Spain and Portugal don’t close this gap, they risk remaining a dwindling trade corridor, powering Europe’s cannabis ecosystem without shaping it. If Iberia can close this gap, the peninsula will not merely remain Europe’s factory — it will become its centre of gravity.

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Arnau Valdovinos

Contributor |  More postsBio

As founder and principal consultant at Cannamonitor, Arnau connects the dots of the global cannabis supply chain through an independent view of the international market. An advocate for evidence-based drug policy reform, Arnau has since 2018 provided intelligence and practical advice to medicinal, recreational and CBD companies across 5 continents and 19 countries.

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