According to a reform memo launched this week by Biden-elect’s planners, the new administration might alleviate America’s hemp industry. The memo entails encouraging the cultivation of carbon-sequestering crops.
Apart from being a wider environmental initiative, the proposed Climate 21 Project by Biden’s administration features a memo on provisions that the USDA (U.S Department of Agriculture) can implement to play a major role in battling climate change. Although hemp is not mentioned in the new administration’s plan, the plant is an excellent cushion to meet the Climate 21 Project recommendations’ objectives.
Among the most significant suggestions is establishing and expanding programs that motivate landowners, ranchers, and farmers to assimilate approaches that scientists believe may help minimize atmospheric carbon.
The memo’s authors recommend that the USDA’s footprint, loan, grant-making authority and its impact on rural America’s decision making should create a lynchpin of the future administration’s climate approach.
According to Biden advisers’ related proposal, the Commodity Credit Corporation might be used to generate a state carbon-bank. This bank will provide carbon-sequestered credits via long-term management practices (a welcome window for commercial hemp farmers).
This strategy proposes USD 1 billion to buy carbon credits at USD20 for each ton. The authors estimate that this move will minimize emissions of greenhouse gas by fifty megatons annually. The proposal further suggests that the administration should pass a provision that authorizes USDA to sell the bought credits to a carbon market.
Aside from the carbon-reduction methods, the Climate 21 Project also recommends the USDA fund climate-smart farming by improving crop-insurance policies and investing in the country’s CRP (Conservation Research Program). This may enable hemp farmers to acquire more funding incentives.
Although Biden and Kamala Harris are not super fans of the cannabis industry, expect them to understand industrial hemp perks and won’t allow any negative interference to the sector’s development. Thanks to the hyper-partisan meltdown in the current political scene, hemp remains to be a bi-partisan matter from the Congress halls to the hemp farms across the country.
