Source: dubbophotonews.com.au
Organic hulled hemp seeds.
These days our allegedly advanced society is all about the process with little regard for getting the best outcome and it’s all about following the money.
According to the latest reported data, the richest one per cent of the population has amassed more than 90 per cent of the wealth and they want to keep it that way.
Recent ICAC findings on systemic corruption in the political process may well be just the tip of the iceberg, and it’s all about the people who control the money keeping a tight rein on their ever-growing fortunes.
How’s this for a fictional scenario: imagine an agricultural crop that could replace the plastics industry. That would mean half the world’s oil production, which is used in the plastics processing industry, wouldn’t be needed.
Imagine if that same crop could provide high quality paper products, meaning no more forests would have to be chopped down.
At the risk of sounding like John Lennon, imagine if this same crop provided building bricks so insulated your house required no expensive heating or cooling; if the health foods that could be produced from it could help beat many types of cancers; if the wood replacement products were lighter and stronger than the construction materials made of wood; if this crop used only 20 to 30 per cent of the water needed for other major crops; if this crop needed no expensive pesticides or herbicides... imagine all that.
This crop exists and until 1900, it was the largest traded commodity in the world.
Industrial hemp isn’t a drug but as a cousin to cannabis it’s an easy headline for a gullible and mostly corporate media. The crop has been demonised by major players who are scared it could impact on their bottom line.
In the 1940s Henry Ford built a car from industrial hemp he grew on his own property (Google this story) and he claimed the hemp ‘plastic’ body was 10 times stronger than steel. He powered it from ethanol distilled from the same hemp crop grown on his property.
You can’t do that with wheat or canola or lucerne or any other crop, yet the current paradigm not only makes it difficult to grow hemp in this state, the commonwealth’s 2006 ‘war on drugs’ legislation banned hemp products for human consumption.
Along with New Zealand, we’re the only country with this ban in place.
It gets crazier. In the good old US of A you can eat hemp products, but you can’t grow the crop. Enterprising Canadian famers lobbied their government to make the crop legal, and in just a few short years that country now exports almost a billion dollars of products into the USA. The market is growing exponentially, and those farmers are getting a premium price for their product which is not only improving the biology of their soil each year, but is much cheaper to grow than other crops because the hugely expensive chemical sprays aren’t needed.
This also means they’re not killing their soil biology each year just to use topsoil as a huge hydroponic field.
Macquarie 2100 has a charter to constantly improve the economic, environmental and social aspects of the lower Macquarie Valley for the next 100 years and I see no other game-changer which could potentially provide hundreds of manufacturing jobs along with massive boosts to farm gate profits and huge uptakes of carbon into our soils.
The only reason the industry has been suppressed is that too many big companies would take hits to their bottom lines.
As a journalist for 20 years, I continually saw politicians and senior bureaucrats paid incredible amounts of money in retirement to sit on boards or act as consultants, in many cases for companies who had massively benefitted from decisions they’d made while they had the necessary political and departmental clout.
At the state level, the ICAC has been showing us this pattern of how looking after people in a benign fashion will lead to unspoken rewards down the track.
We need a groundswell of public activism to force elected and unelected decision makers to act in the national interest, and in the case of industrial hemp, cut through the roadblocks and allow it to become the jobs generator it can be.
Imagine a valley where workers construct all sorts of mainstream, in demand, eco-friendly products using 3D printing technology in ‘smart’ factories.
Imagine a host of cottage industries springing up where small family businesses supplied industrial hemp health food products to niche markets across the world.
Imagine a local economy where farmers weren’t forced to take the same price for their wheat as they did in 1980, when input costs were just a fraction of what they are today.
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