THE BAG LADY VS. THE BAG MAN

The cute blonde in the window epitomises cool chic. The bag in her hand epitomises cruel reality; the fact that cotton is forced upon farmers in the Third World, who are obliged to use 50% of the world's pesticides on this killer crop, then allow their waterways to be depleted. Many of them are committing suicide and coming down with mysterious diseases from the nasty pesticides they are using. The bag she is showing off may not be plastic, but it is not wholesome either.

The man to her left epitomises opposite ideals; the working man, the environmentalist, the person who cares enough to listen to the facts and really do something to make a change. In the shop behind the woman in black they sell a book titled Change the World for a Fiver. As Jeremy Clarkson pointed out today in one of the papers here, mantras are easy, and somewhat recently a bunch of idealists came unto us with their own mantras, including "work makes free"; they were the National Socialist Party in Germany, and the trouble with them was they did not listen, they had an agenda and lots of cute blondes in black clothing to smile down on the rest of the world.

The man's bag says it all; it answers succinctly back to the smiling dummy with: "This bag is not plastic, it is the real thing, HEMP".

Indeed it is. It does not need the pesticides cotton does, in fact, in the US the No. 1 cotton producing farmer grew lots of it on his land to keep down the pests . Neither does it drink up your water as cotton does, and, of importance to the UK and other northern countries, it can be grown quite well whereas cotton does not grow above the US Mason-Dixon line. Hemp does, however, grow quite well on both sides of this controversial divide.