How do US officials contribute to the development of American hemp

The rapidly growing technical cannabis market in the United States in the short term cannot be filled with high-quality seeds of American production, so the national breeding and seed companies for the next few years open a window of opportunity to promote high-quality seeds in Ukraine to the extremely promising American seed market .

The adoption in the United States at the end of 2018 of the law on the removal of low-narcotic cannabisa and its products from the list of controlled substances, including canceled the authority of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to require permission to import technical hemp into the country.

In connection with the above, a legal vacuum was created that hinders the development of American hemp breeding. Industry representatives appealed for help in solving this problem to the US Department of Agriculture (United States Department of Agriculture, USDA), whose officials have now assumed the role of regulating the import of hemp raw materials in order to ensure safe trade in agricultural products. According to representatives of the American hemp business, this kind of activity is extremely relevant, since most of the seed material is imported and the lack of mechanisms for resolving issues related to the importation of planting material into the country could have an extremely negative impact on the development of rapidly reviving American hemp breeding.

According to the USDA representative, “Since the DEA does not have the right to grant the appropriate permits to import cannabis seeds into the country, agricultural producers from the beginning of 2019 constantly came to us asking how to import seed. In the United States, technical hemp seed is not grown in sufficient quantity and there is no stock. The lack of planting could have led to the disruption of the sowing company in 2019, so the situation around the cultivation of industrial crops of technical hemp in the United States and the lack of the necessary planting material, it was decided to correct. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service has developed a manual for the import of technical hemp seeds in the United States, which includes the following rules:

• Seeds imported from Canada must be accompanied by either phytosanitary certification by the National Canadian Plant Protection Organization to verify the origin of the seeds and confirmation that no pests have been detected in plants, or by the Federal Seed Analysis Certificate;

•   Seeds imported from countries other than Canada must be accompanied by a phytosanitary certificate from the national plant protection organization of the exporting country to verify the origin of the seeds and confirm that no pests have been found in the plants.

• lots of technical cannabis seeds can be checked on arrival at the port by representatives of the US Customs and Border Protection Service, in order to comply with the rules set forth by the USDA, which include certification and the necessary measures to protect the domestic market from plant pests.

Thus, in the course of export supplies of technical hemp seed to the US, the previously required DEA clearance by the customs and border services of the country is no longer required.

Commentary of the Association "Ukrainian technical hemp"

Until recently, each delivery of technical hemp seeds did not do without the special permission of the DEA, after carrying out the relevant procedures did not always provide the appropriate permission to import into the country a strictly specified amount of seed (at the moment this administrative barrier has been abolished). The presence of phytosanitary certificates prescribed by the rules developed by the USDA is not something extraordinary and it turns out for every export supply even commercial seeds not only hemp.

The rapidly growing technical cannabis market in the United States in the short term cannot be filled with high-quality seeds of American production, so the national breeding and seed companies for the next few years open a window of opportunity to promote high-quality seeds in Ukraine to the extremely promising American seed market .