Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
consolation, however, for the previous 40 years
had seen ships dispense with sails in favour of
steam power.
On the eve of World War I, there remained
a small number of tall ships, most notably the
clippers with their 4000 m
2
of sail. These were
largely foreign ships, few in number and did
not represent a client base for the French hemp
industry.
Once again, it would appear that, faced
with a straightforward problem - that of a fall-
ing demand for hemp - there was a failure to
ask the simple question: why?
On closer examination, it would have been
obvious that cotton, together with the advent
of steam power, was killing off hemp as a
textile and as a means of harnessing wind
power for locomotion.
We must refrain from stoning our fore-
bears, however, for it is possible to cite a
hundred examples of similar behaviour within
the field of agriculture over the past 20 years.
Since the 17th century, hemp cultivation
had flourished after having been introduced by
immigrants (Hopkins, 1951). Of course, it
should be remembered that the draft versions
of the American Constitution of 1787 were
written on paper made from hemp. With a
large demand for hemp, the USA even
imported Russian hemp. In the meantime,
however, technological developments contin-
ued to appear.
In terms of paper production, the chemi-
cal processes that allowed wood pulp to be
turned into paper were under development.
These processes, including the use of sulfites
for the extraction of lignin and the use of chlo-
rine to whiten the pulp, allowed leafy and res-
inous wood to replace flax, hemp and cotton
as sources of paper. And both the USA and
Canada had an abundant supply of wood!
Advances in chemistry allowed formulae
and procedures to be perfected that would give
rise to a range of synthetic fibres, placing these
products in direct competition with hemp and
plant fibres in general.
Meanwhile, hemp came under attack for
its pharmacological properties. The drug had
no doubt always existed in the USA when,
around 1910, African Americans created
jazz and introduced 'marijuana'. However,
the term 'marijuana' was given to this plant
by the Mexicans of Pancho Villa's army
(Booth, 2003).
A campaign to ban hemp was launched,
arguing that the use of dope (which comes
from hemp) was unhealthy and promoted lazi-
ness among the workforce. A series of adver-
tising campaigns were begun in the name of
moral standards and public health. Their objec-
tive was clear: to ban hemp.
Who waged this campaign? The newspa-
pers of the William Hearst Group (Rosenthal,
1994) and the 'Citizen Kane' of Orson Welles,
who were also the owners of large tracts of
North American forests. At the time, these
papers were known as the 'yellow press', for
the chemicals used to transform wood pulp
into paper produced a newspaper that would
yellow after exposure to light.
The petrochemical giant, Du Pont de
Nemours, now known as DuPont, was, at the
same time, working on the development
of synthetic fibres derived from the petrol
2.7
Political Manoeuvrings and
Hemp in the Modern Era
After World War I, both hemp and flax saw
their importance diminish year by year. The
former certainly did not appear to be used as a
textile. It was, however, still used in the produc-
tion of sacking, rope and string. It also held its
ground in the field of paper production, for it
could be transformed into fine-quality paper
and was used for the production of certain spe-
cial paper products.
Hemp cultivation fell into decline every-
where and even disappeared in certain coun-
tries. Only the USSR maintained its hemp
production, despite the competition afforded
by the Muslim Soviet republics of Central Asia.
The area under cultivation fell from 870,000
ha to 250,000 ha in 20 years. Serbia, Hungary
and Romania also managed to maintain a cer-
tain amount of production. As for France, in
the 1930s, there remained but a few hundred
hectares in production, essentially all within
the department of Sarthe.
But it was in the USA, during the interwar
years, that some remarkable strong-arm tactics
were brought to bear on the industry.
