WHAT THE YANKS CAN'T DO,

THE CANADIANS CAN

Still illegal in the US is the crop that was once the most traded commodity in the world. Farmers are forced to grow more water intensive crops such as cotton and use lots of chemicals on it and other pesticide loving plants.

Cross the border and you will find lots of hemp, and plates like the one in the photo. Business is booming! For instance, Roger Snow of Rocky Mountain Grain Products is doing so much he sent me a whole box, with 7 bins of hemp hearts and 14 hemp chocolate bars. He has some 10,000 acres under cultivation. He and others, such as Nick Smirnow of Still Eagle, are also selling copies of Hemp for Victory, part of which is printed on hemp paper (with a nice hemp leaf watermark to boot, and a foreword by Woody Harrelson).

Cannabis sativa is legal all over the EU, and in Australia and New Zealand. In fact, just about all of the English speaking world! China has just about a monopoly on hemp textiles though, as it is where the infrastructure exists for retting and milling, but Canadians have been quietly researching a way to develop this for themselves in the future. If they do, they will join China, Romania, Italy, Korea and Nepal as hemp textile producers. Romanian and Nepalese hemp is usually rough in comparison to Chinese, but recently some Korean hemp was brought to the UK that was, as Bobby Pugh notes, as fine as silk. However, it is only exported in large quantities, and not made into clothing in Korea. Italian hemp may be the finest available, used by both Girgio Armani and Jilly Cholmondeley; the latter sells 100% hemp bedsheets, currently in stock at Eco in Chiswick. But even the Armani could be finer; hemp was once spun as fine lace.

The improvement in quality is a challenge to the hemp world, and it may well be the Canadians who crack it. Something for Bush to think about.

HEMP AND HONEY

Ever since the rise of Dictator W and Homeland Security, the US has had its share of storms, high school shootings and agricultural disasters. Lately a die-off among honey bees is bad news for farmers as many are dependent upon these creatures to pollinate their crops.

It is thought that the use of so many pesticides may be the cause of this. Cotton farming especially pollutes the farmland. The legislators are often scuzzbags who will betray the people to the industrial polluters.

Hemp offers a solution to this in that it does not require much pesticide use. As for bees, they are known to collect some amount of hemp pollen from the rather non-descript, apetallous flowers, but this ends up as a trace amount in their honey. It is possible to determine the origin of honey by the amount of hemp pollen present. Honey from northern California and Romania are known to have a high percentage of hemp pollen.

Hemp is often wind pollinated, so this may not affect hemp; that is, if it were to be grown in the US in the first place. Plants most affected are trees, such as cherry and apple. Most grain, such as wheat, is also wind pollinated, so we can still eat, but we may have to live by bread alone.