Lackluster efforts by European and North American governments have allowed China to potentially dominate the production and application of industrial hemp for decades.
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China is poised to dominate the fast-growing global industrial hemp market, and will affect how markets shape up in Europe and North America. Chinese firms are quickly ramping up research and development across all hemp sub-sectors as farm fields under hemp expand rapidly. Hemp planting in China will surpass 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) for the first time this year, nearly half of the hectarage planted in all of Europe.
Kehrt Reyher, Editor and Publisher at HempToday notes “China’s capacity and cheap labor means highly competitive pricing. Chinese players are addressing quality issues faster than many in the industry think. All this will put pressure on players in the still-evolving markets of Europe and North America.”
The concern is based largely on the availability of native landraces for producing well-adapted varieties of hemp for local conditions and domestic production. China’s Heilongjiang Province, which can legitimately be considered the world epicenter of industrial hemp, has the most growing fields of any contiguous market in the world. This year fields totaled more than 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres). Meanwhile, the development of infrastructure and R&D is quickly expanding.
In 2009, Chinese authorities rolled out a plan to plant hemp on 1,333,333 hectares (3,300,000 acres) to produce 2,000,000 tons of fibers, the traditional hemp product, to feed the country’s mills, which currently export about 2 million meters of hemp textiles annually.
HempToday’s Reyher says ” Political changes in Europe and America are opening strong new markets for hemp fibers from China in building materials, food, bio-composites, health products and even nanotechnology applications, all with strong government support, which will boost those numbers substantially if the country continues to dominate the development of hemp.”
As China becomes more independent in technology and engineering work, the manufacturing and processing machinery required to remain competitive as the price of labor in the country grows, and the research to develop seeds for various geographic regions, are tasks they can tackle on their own instead of sourcing from the west. In addition, rich biodiversity of Chinese hemp gives them a great start in the quest for the perfect seed. North American and European governments and their farming lobbyists ignore the urgency in developing a viable industrial hemp strategy at their peril.
HempToday is based in the beautiful Palace at Nakło, Lelów, Poland, offering its members networking and communication services to help shape the industrial hemp value chain in Europe and the rest of the world.
Contact Info:
Name: Kehrt Reyher
Email: info@hemptoday.net
Organization: HempToday
Address: Nakło 74, Lelów, Silesia 42-235, Poland
Phone: +48-602-336-685
For more information, please visit https://hemptoday.net
Source: NewsNetwork
Release ID: 406054
