Hemp Bound by Doug Fine

Author:Doug Fine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60358-544-6
Published: 2014-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Don’t Just Legalize It—Subsidize It

By the time I clued in to communities like Feldheim, I was pretty excited. The whole picture was in place: seed oil, construction material, energy. Hemp hemp hooray.

I remember gleefully perusing my gasification file at the tail end of my Canadian hemp research, just after informing the U.S. Customs man that I carried no hemp home with me “other than my breakfast, lunch, pants,34 shirt, hat, and soap.” Game on for this industry, I thought.

Then, back in comparatively toasty New Mexico, I spoke to some European consultants who kind of brought me back to Earth. “See,” they explained, “there’s this thing called the real-world economy.”

Even with all of hemp’s exciting species saving and climate change mitigation, a German hemp expert named Michael Carus told me I shouldn’t expect a profitable American market to leap magically into existence the moment domestic cultivation ramps up.

In fact, it might need help to ramp up, he said. Income from domestic hemp cultivation for fiber, especially, wouldn’t be competitive enough on the free market to incentivize American farmers to grow the millions of acres we need for our dual-cropping, humanity-saving plan. He said China, to give one example, grows textile fiber cheaper than America would.35

What a downer (sorry, realist) that Carus was! Of all the hemp experts I interviewed, he was the one who seemed patently uninspired by the American hemp sector coming online. I got the impression that most of our hour-long conversation was, for him, an exercise in reticence and caution, no doubt well learned. Indeed, the European market, though steady and robust at a hundred million dollars annually, wasn’t projected to show Canadian-level growth in 2013, and there was even talk of a seed shortage.

Still, I sometimes think these Europeans willingly fail to figure American exuberance into their economic formulae. That’s our real fuel. That, hemp oil, and love are pretty much all I run on. They and indeed all economists can call it ∑ or ® or something and consider it a constant that makes any venture ten times more likely to work. Some folks might think I’m kidding. Actually, persistence and optimism, basically America’s two required traits, are always listed among the most vital qualities cited by today’s successful entrepreneurs in your finer airline magazines.

Whatever the reason, I just couldn’t get Carus psyched about American hemp prospects. That is, until the very end of the interview. It was only when I asked him, “What if official U.S. policy incorporated the true economic value of the cannabis plant, including soil remediation from hemp’s, ya know, famously deep taproots?” that Carus finally burst into an almost New World exuberance.

“If you can convince Obama to implement European-style subsidies, the U.S. market’ll be okay,” he blurted, albeit with a sort of deep chuckle. Then he added, quite seriously, “Like Europe, American agriculture is guided by government incentives. If your government decides it wants to encourage hemp, well . . .” At this Carus’s face melted back into mirth, and

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