Asia Is Where Hemp's Next Chapter Gets Written

India may be the clearest near-term opportunity. The domestic industrial hemp market was worth around USD 220 million in 2024 and is projected to approach USD 950 million by 2032, growing at nearly 19% a year.^[2] Uttarakhand became the first state to legalise commercial cultivation in 2018, and Himachal Pradesh followed with a pilot framework after a 2024 assembly resolution.^[3] Foods are the wedge: national food standards now formally allow hemp seed, seed oil and flour as food.^[4] With Himalayan growing conditions, a deep textile tradition, and certified low-THC fibre and seed varieties now in development through public research institutes, India has both the agronomy and the manufacturing base to scale.^[2]

Nepal breaks my heart a little, because the potential is so obvious and the policy so slow. Hemp — allo and true hemp — has been grown in the mid-hills for millennia, wild-harvested organically at altitude. Researchers have identified roughly 1.8 million hectares of suitable land.^[5] Yet cultivation of the plant technically remains restricted under the 1976 Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act, with legalisation bills still stalled in federal parliament.^[6] The encouraging shift is bottom-up: Gandaki Province has tabled a formal bill, and Ilam Municipality has opened a tightly controlled fibre-only pilot.^[7] The world already wants "Himalayan Hemp" the way it wants pashmina. Nepal just needs the legal clarity to meet the demand it can't currently fulfil.

Thailand is the region's most dynamic — and most turbulent — market. It became the first Asian country to decriminalise cannabis in 2022, then reclassified cannabis flower as a "controlled herb" in June 2025, tightening what had been a free-for-all.^[8] Crucially, that reset didn't kill hemp. Hemp seed and seed oil remain legal food ingredients, and products under 0.2% THC continue to move through regulated channels.^[9] For anyone serious about foods, textiles, bioplastics and construction, Thailand offers something rare in Southeast Asia: real infrastructure, established supply chains, and a maturing regulatory spine. It rewards operators who respect the rules.

Japan is the long game, and I have enormous respect for how deliberately it's playing it. Hemp — asa — has been cultivated here since the Jōmon period, woven into Shinto ritual and everyday life for thousands of years.^[10] The modern market is tightly held: the CBD market was already worth around USD 160 million in 2023, even under near-zero-THC rules.^[11] The 2023–2024 reforms to the Cannabis Control Act opened a pathway for cannabis-derived pharmaceuticals and a tiered cultivation licensing system.^[12] At the recent Japanese International Hemp Expo, the focus was industrial hemp, textiles, building materials and cosmetics — precise, intentional, and unmistakably rooted in heritage.^[13] When Japan moves, it moves durably.

South Korea is quietly building something structural. Andong has produced hemp textile — the traditional sambe cloth — since ancient times, and in 2020 the government designated Gyeongbuk as the country's first regulation-free zone for hemp, the only place licensed farmers can legally cultivate.^[14][15] The market is being engineered upward from research toward pharmaceutical-grade output: in December 2025, the country broke ground on its first GMP facility for hemp-derived CBD raw-material pharmaceuticals in Andong, targeting completion in 2027.^[16] The broader cannabis market is projected to reach around USD 528 million by 2029.^[17] Marry that to Korea's world-leading cosmetics and manufacturing sectors and you have a serious downstream engine.

Across all five, the same four applications keep surfacing — foods, plastics, building, textiles — and the same regional tailwinds are lifting them. Hemp can sequester up to 15 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare annually, and the Asian Development Bank estimates Southeast Asia will need over 1.5 billion square metres of sustainable building materials by 2030.^[18] Hempcrete, hemp bioplastics, hemp fibre for a textile industry desperate to clean up its footprint — this is exactly where a whole-of-plant, circular-economy crop belongs.

I've testified to parliaments, sat in ministries, and walked fields on four continents. What I keep coming back to is this: hemp doesn't ask a region to become something it isn't. It asks it to remember what it already was, and to build forward from there. Asia has the history, the hands, and increasingly the frameworks. The next decade belongs to the people willing to do the patient work of connecting them.