Hemp Farmers Are Fed Up With Government Regulations Hampering The Industry’s Potential… After exhausting their savings and losing hope for more meaningful legislative relief, some hemp producers in Hawaii may ditch the crop altogether.
Pioneers of Hawaii’s latent hemp industry are selling off land, laying off staff and no longer planting after years of waiting for the state to ease regulations that they consider overly restrictive and expensive.
The resignation hemp farmers feel comes after years of investment and soliciting funders on a premise that the state would ease its rules and ensure Hawaii would have the lucrative hemp market it had been anticipating since 1999.
But farmers say the last minute gutting of Senate Bill 2986, which would have eased state regulation of the crop, during the latest legislative session is a death knell for the early adopters as they struggle to access Hawaii’s hemp market, valued at up to $54 million. And now, the proposed permanent rules that the bill would have erased face a June 30 deadline, which means yet another year of over-regulation, the farmers say.
