GREEN ROUTE: Hemp dreams — young South African pioneers create a new industry against all odds

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> South African startup Green Route is reimagining hemp as a commercial textile powerhouse, breeding local seeds to boost manufacturing and create sustainable jobs.

On a smallholding 40 minutes south of Johannesburg, near the town of Walkerville, the first indication of something exceptional unfolding beyond the high brick wall alongside a solitary rural road is the birds. Thousands of them, tending to their nests in a one-acre thicket of sturdy stalks.

The canopy of leaves above has an iconic shape: the seven-fingered star, with its jagged edges; totemised by the Rastafarian movement; demonised by Richard Nixon’s and Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs that, for several generations, doomed cannabis to the classification of a Schedule I drug. For more than a century of its 10,000-year existence as a domesticated crop – one of Mesolithic humanity’s first, and most diversely useful – it’s been lumped together with heroin, LSD and ecstasy as an addictive drug with “high potential for abuse” .

Many plant species are made up of varieties and cultivars. In the case of Cannabis sativa , it’s a single plant with two different names and one crucial distinction: “marijuana” contains intoxicating levels of the cannabinoid chemical delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. Hemp, unless specifically grown to do so, contains so little of this psychoactive ingredient that it’s barely worth mentioning: less than 0.3% by dry weight.

This is one of the reasons lobbying efforts over the past decade have forced governments around the world to acknowledge the economic, cultural and ecological short-sightedness of stigmatising and relegating to the illicit drug trade a plant as multifaceted and as tied to human development as cannabis.

In the years since 2018, when the South African government decriminalised the personal use of cannabis, regulations and attitudes have begun to change. For “pioneers”, the uptake is painfully slow. But thousands of South Africans have since applied for licences to farm and manufacture cannabis for both its CBD-based, recreational and medicinal uses; and for the remarkable array of products hemp can supply, and the almost unparalleled ecological benefits the plant provides.

“I think that’s one of the things I love most about this crop, is that you literally see an ecosystem come to life where there were no signs of life before,” said Mahlatse Mohlala, walking with his colleague, agriculturist Chad Ferlito, beneath the busy nests.

“I’ve seen grey loeries, I’ve seen cranes. The rest of the wildlife around here is benefiting from the fact that there’s no pesticides, no herbicides, there’s nothing unnatural. I haven’t even put down nutrients or fertilisers. I haven’t had to,” said Ferlito.

Mohlala is the founder and director of Green Route Hemp Industries, a nascent hemp textile manufacturing company that, in less than three years, has become a leader in this space.