Thailand's Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine (DTAM) opened its 2025 GACP certification application window on June 27, 2025. GACP, Good Agricultural and Collection Practice, is the certification standard that determines whether a Thai cannabis cultivator is legally eligible to grow and supply medical cannabis for domestic use and export. DTAM is the sole issuing authority for Thai GACP certificates, a status confirmed on the same day the 2025 window opened, when the department published a status update on already-certified farms and factories alongside the applications it was currently processing. For any operator building a Thai cannabis cultivation business, this annual window is not a formality. It is the single gate that determines whether a farm can legally supply the domestic market or feed export volume, and understanding its mechanics is the difference between a predictable timeline and months of avoidable delay.
What DTAM Published on June 26, 2025
One day ahead of opening the 2025 application window, DTAM released a status update on its GACP certification pipeline. At that point, 36 applicants were in the document-review stage and 37 were in the site-inspection stage, with DTAM targeting completion of those site inspections by August 5, 2025. This was not a symbolic announcement. It was an operational status report showing exactly how many applications were moving through each of the two stages that stand between submission and a certificate, and it gave cultivators a concrete data point for how quickly DTAM was processing that year's backlog.
The distinction between the two stages matters for anyone planning around a certification timeline. Document review is the paperwork stage: DTAM confirms that an applicant's submission includes the required cultivation plans, standard operating procedures, facility records, and supporting documentation before it schedules a physical visit. Site inspection is the verification stage: DTAM staff visit the farm or facility to confirm that what was submitted on paper matches what is actually being grown and handled on the ground. An application only becomes a certificate once it clears both stages, and the 36/37 split published on June 26, 2025 shows that a meaningful share of that year's applicant pool was still working through document review even as others had already advanced to inspection.
Why GACP Certification Is the Gate, Not a Formality
GACP certification is not an optional quality mark for a Thai cannabis cultivator. It is the credential DTAM requires before a farm can supply cannabis into Thailand's regulated medical-cannabis supply chain, and it sits upstream of nearly every other license in the value chain. A cultivation site without a valid GACP certificate cannot legally sell raw material to a licensed processor, a licensed distributor cannot legally source from it, and an export license under Section 46 of the Protection and Promotion of Thai Traditional Medicine Knowledge Act B.E. 2542 has no legitimate domestic supply to draw on if the underlying farm was never certified. In practice, this makes the annual GACP application window the single point in the calendar where new cultivation capacity either enters the regulated system or is left waiting another year to try again.
That is also why DTAM's decision to publish pipeline data alongside the 2025 window's opening date is worth paying attention to. A regulator that discloses how many applicants are in document review versus site inspection, and gives a target completion date for that inspection round, is giving the market a real planning signal, not just a filing deadline. For an operator deciding whether to build a new cultivation facility, expand an existing one, or wait for a future window, that kind of visibility into DTAM's actual processing capacity is more useful than the bare fact that a window exists.
Why This Window Is the Mechanism Behind the Site's Farm-Count Growth
Industry reports citing DTAM data put the number of GACP-certified farms at 149 as of late November 2025. By February 13, 2026, that figure had grown to 217 GACP farms. The June 2025 application window, and the document-review and site-inspection pipeline that followed it, is the operational mechanism that produced that growth. Applications opened June 27, 2025 did not convert into certificates overnight. They moved through document review, then site inspection, then final DTAM approval, over the following months, and the farm count climbed as each cohort cleared the pipeline. Anyone trying to forecast how many GACP farms will be certified by a future date needs to think in terms of this pipeline, not a single application deadline. The count on any given date reflects how many applicants from prior windows have fully cleared both stages, not how many have simply applied.
This also explains why certification timelines can run considerably longer than applicants expect. An application submitted at the start of a window is not guaranteed a quick certificate. It first has to clear document review, which can surface deficiencies that send an application back for correction, and only then does it enter the queue for a physical site inspection. DTAM's own August 5, 2025 target for completing that year's site inspections gives a rough sense of the internal cadence: roughly six weeks from the June 26 status update to the point where the inspection stage for that cohort was expected to close out. Final approval and certificate issuance follow after that, adding further time before a farm actually holds a valid GACP certificate.
What Cultivators Should Take Away from This Timeline
The practical lesson for any cultivator or investor evaluating a Thai cannabis cultivation project is that GACP certification runs on an annual application cycle with two distinct internal stages, and both stages have their own capacity constraints. A cultivator that assumes certification is a matter of filing paperwork and waiting a few weeks is planning around the wrong model. The realistic model is: submit during the annual window, expect a document-review period during which DTAM confirms the submission is complete and compliant, then expect a site-inspection period during which DTAM physically verifies the operation, and only then expect approval. Each of those stages can be affected by how many other applicants are in the queue at the same time, which is exactly what the 36-in-review, 37-in-inspection snapshot from June 26, 2025 illustrates.
Operators renewing an existing GACP certificate face the same structural pipeline every year the window reopens, so tracking DTAM's own timing, rather than assuming a fixed annual date, matters for continuity of supply. A farm that misses a window, or submits incomplete documentation that gets bounced back during document review, risks a gap between its old certificate's expiry and a new one's issuance, which can interrupt both domestic supply commitments and export eligibility. Building in buffer time ahead of an expected window, and preparing documentation to a standard that clears review on the first pass, is the most reliable way to avoid that gap.
Preparing Before the Window Opens
Because document review is the first checkpoint DTAM applies, the applications that move fastest through the 2025-style pipeline are the ones that arrive complete on day one. That means cultivation plans, standard operating procedures for planting through harvest, facility layout records, and staff training documentation should already be finalized before the window opens, not assembled after submission. Applicants that use the weeks before a window opens to rehearse their own facility against DTAM's site-inspection expectations, effectively an internal mock inspection, tend to clear the site-inspection stage without the back-and-forth that stretches out a certification timeline. Given that the 2025 window's own site-inspection target was roughly six weeks out from the June 26 status update, an applicant that walks into inspection with outstanding gaps is very unlikely to make that same window's cutoff and instead rolls into a slower, more contested queue.
This preparation work also has export implications beyond the domestic GACP certificate itself. A farm chasing international buyers under standards like EU-GACP or the Control Union Medical Cannabis Standard (CUMCS) needs cultivation and collection records that are already structured to a defensible, auditable standard. Building that documentation discipline around the Thai GACP application, rather than retrofitting it later for a foreign buyer's due diligence, saves an operator from doing the same documentation work twice.
DeeMED Consulting tracks DTAM's annual GACP application windows and works directly with cultivators on Thai GACP certification, from preparing a submission that clears document review cleanly to coordinating the site-inspection stage with DTAM. Understanding the mechanics behind DTAM's published pipeline data is what separates a cultivator that treats certification timing as a guess from one that plans around a known, if imperfect, process.
Sources & Further Reading
- Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine (DTAM), dtam.moph.go.th