- 2018 Farm Bill promotes federal legalization of non-psychoactive industrial hemp in United States
- Majority of states already have legal pilot programs to analyze industrial hemp’s potential for boosting agriculture
- Global Hemp Group already testing revitalized cultivation of hemp in Canada, with interest in U.S. market
While states continue to grapple with how they will approach medical and recreational marijuana controversies, as well as the federal government’s drug classification policy in the United States, a more cooperative camaraderie appears to be developing nationwide in regard to the growth of industrial hemp, the cannabis plant’s non-psychoactive breed. The U.S. Senate is debating a 2018 update to its 2014 Farm Bill that legalized hemp for limited agricultural research, and state governments across the country are contemplating the plant’s potential for reviving their agricultural economies.
Global Hemp Group, Inc. (CSE: GHG) (FRANKFURT: GHG) (OTC: GBHPF) has long had an interest in establishing a strong footing in the industrial hemp industries of Canada and the United States. Its headquarters are situated in Vancouver, British Columbia, where it could be in a prime position to take advantage of the Canadian government’s plans to fully legalize recreational drug uses of the cannabis plant later this year. However, Global Hemp Group’s focus is currently on cultivating the non-psychoactive plant variety to extract cannabinoids with a healthful benefit and then to advance through additional phases of cultivation for products that draw on the plant’s potential in tens of thousands of commercial products, including paper, construction fiber, biofuels, clothing and textiles.
Until the United States took an aggressive stance toward the detrimental effects of mind-altering substances in the country’s ‘war on drugs’, hemp enjoyed a history of cash crop production that stretched back beyond the nation’s first president, George Washington, who counted on it in his fields. The 2014 U.S. Farm Bill sought to restore a distinction between hemp and its rebellious marijuana sibling by allowing universities and state governments to grow hemp for research (http://nnw.fm/bV3QD), but, as the Drug Enforcement Administration held to its classification of hemp as a controlled substance and business enterprises occasionally found themselves targeted by law enforcement for marketing food products with hemp-derived ingredients that they argued were protected by the Farm Bill, the bill’s sponsors have moved for a 2018 update that classifies non-psychoactive hemp as a legal commodity answerable to agricultural oversight at the federal level and removes it from the controlled substances list.
Under this new bill, states would continue to retain their right to regulate production, but perhaps most importantly, the bill would allow hemp to qualify for some U.S. Department of Agriculture programs and fall under the coverage of federal crop insurance (http://nnw.fm/Ye64P).
While the federal government debates its policy, Kansas (http://nnw.fm/0b2jC) and Oklahoma (http://nnw.fm/EZ1sj) have joined the 37 states identified by The National Conference of State Legislators as having some form of legal pilot program assessing the potential of industrial hemp for their agricultural futures (http://nnw.fm/m1DPs).
“It looks like the world of hemp in the US is about to enter a new phase and Global Hemp Group is proud to be part of this exciting new sector,” the company stated in a March press release (http://nnw.fm/9fzDB).
Global Hemp Group is focused on corporate acquisitions and joint ventures across all sectors of the hemp industry as it builds a portfolio of networked “soil-to-shelf” businesses that share its commitment to revitalizing the reputation of the versatile plant. One such joint venture led to the cultivation of hemp on the Acadian peninsula of New Brunswick, Canada last year – the first time the plant had been grown in the region in two decades (http://nnw.fm/O47bb).
Analysis by the Hemp Industries Association pegged the yearly retail revenue from hemp products at $573 million in the United States during 2015 (http://nnw.fm/5v0Rr). Cannabis analytics firm Brightfield Group estimated that Hemp-derived cannabidiol health food industry products alone netted $170 million in 2016 and predicted they would reach the billion-dollar level within three years, according to a report in Forbes (http://nnw.fm/b1kUk).
For more information, visit the company’s website at www.GlobalHempGroup.com
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