Word: hemp
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There is apt to be very little more jute (or burlap, which is made from jute) for the U.S., and no abaca (Manila hemp). Those facts may sound esoteric to the layman, but they have the U.S. Government-and all who know about jute and hemp-in a frenzy...
...wealth of fibers. Chief commercial ones are sisal and henequen, which grow more or less prolifically in Yucatan, Cuba, Haiti, other parts of Latin America. Exotic fibers-caroa, guaxima, papoula de Sao Francisco from Brazil, cabuya from Ecuador, pita and fique from Colombia-might replace jute and hemp if they could be produced and processed in sufficient quantity (which would involve new machinery, labor, transportation...
...henequen, sisal, and every other known western fiber but sansevieria, which grows wild in Cuba, lack the resistance to salt water that makes abacá a naval necessity. Moreover, while it takes only four months to get a usable hemp crop, it takes three years to produce sisal, five to seven years for henequen. And low world prices for jute and abacá have kept Hemisphere acreage...
...worst comes to worst, paper wrapping, or wood-packed shipments in bulk, can still substitute for a lot of burlap. But last week, hemp was in such a parlous state that the agricultural fantasy of the century was being seriously pushed in Washington. Commodity Credit Corp. hoped to obtain 240,000,000 lb. of home-grown hemp, 14 times the U.S.'s peak production in World War I. CCC has barely taken its first baby step in the program: persuading U.S. farmers to plant 35,000 acres of hemp for 350,000 bushels of seed. To achieve that goal...
...gets the seed, it must then lure more U.S. farmers to sow it across some 300,000 acres next year, teach them how to grow and harvest it. (But CCC knows of only ten people in all the U.S. who are fully versed in the sensitive art of harvesting hemp: cut too early, the fiber is weak, cut too late, it is damaged.) Thereafter, materials must somehow be found to build 100 processing plants near the new hemp fields, men must be trained to staff them...