Antigua: MCA Cuts Licence Fees 80% for Citizen-Owned Cultivation Groups

As of May 2026, Antigua and Barbuda’s Medicinal Cannabis Authority has unveiled a new Collaborative Grow Licence aimed at citizen-owned ventures, cutting standard licence fees by 80 percent and extending the term to five years. MCA Chief Executive Officer Regis Burton announced the change at a media briefing this week, framing it as a direct response to the high entry costs that have kept locals out of the regulated industry.

What Changed

The new licence is open only to companies owned by five or more Antiguan and Barbudan citizens. Approved applicants get the 80 percent discount and a five-year licence, rather than the standard two-year term issued under the Misuse of Drugs (Amendment) Act, 2018. The structure is progressive: applicants must first obtain a medical marijuana cultivation licence before applying for any of the other nine categories the MCA issues, which include processing, manufacturing, retail, and research.

The announcement follows a Cabinet directive earlier this year that called on the MCA leadership to accelerate industry development. The Authority used the third annual Antigua and Barbuda Cannabis Festival in April as a platform to court local applicants, and the discounted licence is the policy follow-through.

Two cultivation licences have already been issued to GROW Antigua and Barbuda, the country’s first licensed dispensary operator. The Collaborative Grow Licence is designed to widen that pool beyond foreign-backed ventures.

What This Means

For travellers, the immediate change is small. There are still no licensed retail dispensaries open to tourists in Antigua, and possession outside the 15-gram personal limit remains an offence. What the new licence does is shift who is likely to be running the country’s eventual retail and processing infrastructure. If local cooperatives take up the discounted licences, the build-out could lean toward small-batch, locally owned operators rather than imported brand chains.

For investors and Antiguan operators, the five-year term is the more meaningful number. A two-year licence has limited financing utility. A five-year term, even at the entry level, gives applicants something a bank can work with. Combined with the UWI Five Islands research partnership signed at the April festival, the MCA is layering financing reform on top of research infrastructure.

What to Watch

The next test is application volume. Burton has been told by Cabinet to report back on the industry’s progress, and the Collaborative Grow Licence is now the central metric. If five or more citizen-owned consortia move through the process before year-end, the MCA can credibly claim the bottleneck was cost. If take-up is thin, the conversation shifts back to whether the regulatory model itself is the problem.