Hemp Is At Hand

The hemp community has been shouting about the environmental benefits of the plant for years. An oft-quoted statistic is that hemp has more than 25,000 natural uses - ranging from food and oil supplements, made from its seeds, to strong industrial materials processed from its woody outer core. It is fast-growing and can thrive in British soil with little water and with no pesticides or other soil-polluting chemicals. The ban on hemp cultivation, imposed in 1971 under the Misuse of Drugs Act, was finally overturned in 1993. Campaigners successfully argued that although industrial hemp was a variety of the cannabis plant, it could be grown as a legitimate crop as it contained practically no tetrahydrocannabinol, the property that gives marijuana - a different strain of cannabis - its potent effect. Pugh says: "It's tragic when you think of the waste of natural resources - the thousands of trees that have been cut down to make paper when hemp could have been used, the tonnes of carbon dioxide that have been released into the air, the economies crippled by the cotton industry. All of this could have been avoided by using hemp." Since 1993, the growth of the hemp industry has mostly been a matter of research and development. New farming and processing technology, and a lot of investment, are now needed to help industrial hemp to compete with other commercial crops. BioRegional, a sustainable development company, has been researching and developing techniques that it hopes will help realise the potential of hemp as an alternative to cotton. http://environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,,1881460,00.html [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on October 2, 2006]

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