IS COTTON BEING OVERTAKEN BY HEMP IN INDIA?

Cotton, our favourite non-food crop, has been in high demand for decades. Could India finally be about to adopt a much more sustainable alternative?

China and India are currently the world's largest producers of cotton, and they are both amongst the worst environmental offenders in the textiles industry. One kilogram of cotton, it seems, requires 20,000 litres of water to produce. Which means the water required to make a normal garment like a t-shirt, is comparable to the amount of water you'd drink if you lived till your 90s.

Our dependance on cotton may lead India to start using it's locally growing asset, hemp. John Converse Townsend, Writer and Editor with The Huffington Post, explains.

"Hemp is not only a textile-ready natural fiber, it is also UV resistant, antimicrobial, and requires less water and pesticides than the cotton plant. "It's so high value and so much lower impact in every other way that it eclipses the carbon generated through shipping," hemp clothing line founder Isaac Nichelson told the Los Angeles Times in 2010."

"What's more? Hemp grows wild on the Indian landscape. Imagine what could be possible if the plant were cultivated with the same attention cotton recieves," writes Townsend.

According to social entrepeneur Sanvar Oberoi, founder of the Bombay Hemp Company: "Hemp is the most underutilised natural fibre crop in India. Hemp belongs to central Asia. The entire Himalayan belt - Tibet, parts of China, parts of northern India - is home to the world's largest wild cultivation of hemp yet our economy has literally less than 0.1 percent of the global market share. There's literally no industry."

Oberoi notes other reasons to turn away from cotton. His company, Bombay Hemp Company, seeks to shift our focus away from increasingly genetically modified hybrids of cotton towards hemp, which would allow them to avoid the soaring input costs of farming. Even more so, after seeing statistics such as 270,000 Indian farmers commiting suicide since 1995 due to unmanagable debt.

The sensibilities of a move to hemp have been recognised by names such as Levis and Stella McCartney.

Hemp is already being incorporated into their products to improve sustainability. The only holding them back, apparently, is an industry-wide shortage of hemp supply.

This isn't helped by the fact that India's government have banned the growing of industrial hemp for decades. However India's government have recently allowed the Bombay Hemp Company unique permission to use hemp, so attitudes would appear to be changing.

Oberoi's company shares our own ambition to support the lifestyles of the farmers, and in particular the female members of the workforce at the beginning of the supply chain, a problem which is very much alive in India. "...farmers and people who work in agriculture are at the bottommost rung, which is not fair: they're some of the noblest people on the planet...".

The way we see it, if a nation which is not typically thought of as technlogically advanced as the West is already taking steps towards the adoption of hemp, then it says something about the true value of this crop. The true value, unhindered by the ideals of large corporations or misconceptions of the war on drugs. It also suggests the West needs to move more quickly if it is to present any sort of competition to India, as we risk missing the chance to develop vital skills to add hemp production to our economies.

Organisations like Bombay Hemp Company are a shining beacon of hope which hold the potential to launch hemp into the mainstream fashion supply chain.

As Townsend puts it: "The planet would smile, too, because eco-friendly apparel should always be in style.

Original article by Huffington Post