Portugal's medicinal cannabis exports have grown 762% in three years
Infarmed data shows 66,305 kilos left the country in the first half of 2026 alone, more than 80% of the 2025 total. Germany takes roughly three quarters of it.
An industry has been quietly scaling up in Portugal, and the regulator’s latest figures make it hard to keep ignoring. In the first six months of 2026, 66,305 kilos of cannabis for medicinal use left the country. That single half-year is already more than 80% of everything Portugal exported across the whole of 2025.
The climb has been steep and short. Foreign sales were 32,558 kilos in 2024. In 2025 they reached close to 80 tonnes, a jump of roughly 156%. Stack the last three years together and growth comes out around 762%. Infarmed publishes the underlying activity reports on its medicinal cannabis page.
Where it goes
The European Union takes almost all of it, and Germany dominates: German buyers imported 58,257 kilos of Portuguese product in 2025, against 17,716 the year before. That is about 73% of everything shipped that year. Spain and Denmark follow, a long way back.
The reason is regulatory rather than agricultural. Germany loosened access to medicinal cannabis and demand surged; Portugal had licensed greenhouses, the climate for them, and an authority already issuing cultivation and export permits. The sector now employs around seven thousand people.
The domestic side is much smaller
Infarmed logged 5,413 prescriptions in the first half of the year. The home market is growing, but it is nowhere near the export figure. Between January and June the regulator carried out 32 inspections of growing and manufacturing sites, 27 of them on farms.
It is worth reading these numbers next to Portugal’s wider trade figures. In a country whose trade deficit keeps widening, a sector that nearly doubles every year is a rare exception.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: Cannabis Tours / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
