Three cheers for Rob Davies’s decision that he and the department of trade & industry will consider the obstacles and opportunities for SA to become an active and innovative player in the growing hemp market. In the mid-1990s, government departments published plans to encourage tens of thousands of unemployed families on communal land in the Eastern Cape to grow low-cannabis varieties of hemp. Families who grow dagga without Land Bank loans or technical services could easily do the same with low-cannabis hemp varieties. The government sourced a linen mill in Gauteng that, during the off-season for flax, could be contracted to weave hemp into cloth for clothes. Nothing happened for 15 years. Unemployment in communal lands and the clothing industry makes this decades-overdue revival of plans for hemp cloth and clothing urgent. Keith Gottschalk Claremont
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