Hemp fabric is durable and absorbent, and the plant grows with far less water and pesticide than cotton. Those are real advantages, and they are why the fibre survives. The often-repeated claim that it is three times stronger than cotton is not a figure we can source. The more interesting story is why a fibre with real advantages still holds only a fraction of a per cent of the world textile market.
This concerns industrial hemp bast fibre, which comes from the stalk. It does not concern cannabis flower, which in Thailand is a controlled herb dispensed on prescription form PT 33.
1. The Fibre
Hemp bast fibre comes from the outer layer of the stalk. Two kinds of “fibre” need to be kept apart here. The technical fibre bundles that come out of the stalk are long, much longer than cotton’s staple. But they are made of many short ultimate (elementary) fibre cells held together by pectin and lignin, and each of these cells is no longer than a cotton fibre, and often shorter.
This explains both hemp’s strength and its trade-off. The long bundles make strong, hard-wearing yarns. Because they are bundles, though, the yarns are coarse. Getting a finer yarn means breaking the bundles down further (degumming) without losing what makes hemp hemp. For this reason hemp historically went into sailcloth, sacking, rope and workwear rather than into anything worn next to the skin.
Hemp and flax could be hard to tell apart in finished cloth. Herodotus (Histories 4.74, c. 440 BCE) says the Thracians made garments from hemp that looked very like linen. In his account, only someone who knew hemp well could tell the difference, and anyone who had never seen hemp would take the cloth for linen.
That is a useful historical detail, and it is also a warning. Claims about whether a historic textile was hemp or flax are often unreliable in both directions, for exactly this reason. The same caution applies to claims about historic hemp paper.
2. What Holds Up, and What We Cannot Source
Holds up: water. Cotton is among the most water-intensive crops in agriculture. Hemp needs much less irrigation and, in suitable climates, often none. In a region where water allocation is an increasingly live political question, this is the fibre’s strongest argument, and it is not seriously disputed.
Holds up, with a caveat: pesticides. In many growing regions cotton is a heavy user of insecticides. Hemp’s pest profile is much lighter, and it is commonly grown with few inputs. Global percentage figures for cotton’s share of insecticide use circulate widely, but they vary by source and year, so we do not repeat one here.
Holds up: durability and absorbency. Hemp fabric is hard-wearing and absorbent. It softens with washing rather than wearing out quickly.
Cannot source: “three times stronger than cotton.” This figure circulates widely in hemp literature. We could not trace it to a textile-engineering source, and it is unclear what it even measures. Fibre tensile strength, yarn strength and fabric abrasion resistance are three different measurements, and they do not move together. Treat it as unverified. The defensible statement is that hemp makes harder-wearing fabric than cotton, and that is enough.
Overstated: “cooler, more insulating, more absorbent than cotton” all at once. Fabrics rarely win on every measure at the same time. Hemp’s real comfort advantages are absorbency and breathability in a heavy, hard-wearing cloth. Claiming it beats cotton on every property is marketing rather than measurement.
3. The DuPont Story
A popular claim says DuPont’s synthetic fibres were deliberately used to push hemp out of textiles. The evidence does not support it. Synthetics took market share from all natural fibres, including cotton, wool, silk and linen, because they were cheaper and more uniform, so hemp was not singled out. Topic 1322 covers the 1937 history in detail.
4. Why It Is Still a Niche
This is the question worth answering, and prohibition is only part of the answer. The processing side is covered in more depth in topic 252. In short:
Processing. Turning stalk into spinnable fibre takes retting (controlled decomposition that releases the bast), decortication (mechanical separation) and, for apparel-grade yarn, degumming. All three need either a lot of labour or a lot of capital. Cotton ginning, by contrast, is a mature, enormous and globally optimised industry.
China. The infrastructure does exist, mostly in one country. China is widely reported to be the world’s largest producer of hemp textiles. Heilongjiang is its main fibre-growing province, and Yunnan is another centre. Chinese mills degum hemp chemically or enzymatically so that it can run on cotton-type spinning equipment, often for hemp-cotton blends. Even so, hemp remains tiny on the global scale. Textile Exchange’s Materials Market Report 2025 (2024 data) reportedly puts flax and hemp together at about 0.5% of global fibre production, so hemp alone is a fraction of that. The bottleneck is not that processing cannot be done. It is the cost and fineness of the finished yarn compared with cotton.
Fineness. Coarse fibre bundles are hard to spin into fine yarn. Modern processing can produce softer hemp textiles, but each extra step adds cost. A fabric competing against a very cheap incumbent has to be either better or cheaper, and by default hemp is neither.
Scale. Every part of the cotton supply chain has been optimised over 150 years at enormous volume: seed, machinery, ginning, spinning, dyeing and finishing. Outside China, hemp has little of that infrastructure, and building it requires demand that does not yet exist. It is the classic chicken-and-egg problem, and hempcrete faces the same bottleneck.
And the decorticator was never the answer. Hemp literature often presents Schlichten’s 1917 decorticator patent as the technology that would have changed everything. In fact the machine never reached commercial-scale production before his death in 1923. The processing problem was not solved and then suppressed. It was simply not solved.
5. What Would Change It
Three things, and all three are visible now.
Water and pesticide pricing. If cotton’s environmental costs are ever priced properly, hemp’s economics improve without hemp changing at all.
Blends rather than pure hemp. Hemp-cotton and hemp-lyocell blends keep much of hemp’s durability and sustainability at acceptable softness and cost. Most commercial hemp textile today is in blends.
Regional processing. In Southeast Asia, as with hempcrete, the constraint is not agronomy but the missing middle. Outside small community and pilot operations, little industrial-scale retting, degumming and spinning capacity has been publicly reported. Whoever builds that capacity supplies both industries.
6. The Thai Frame
Thailand already has a hemp textile tradition. Hmong communities in the northern highlands, including Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Mae Hong Son, have long grown hemp for cloth: ผ้าใยกัญชง (hemp-fibre cloth). The stalks are processed, spun and woven by hand, and skirts are decorated with indigo wax-resist batik and embroidery. Since the mid-2000s the Royal Project Foundation and the Highland Research and Development Institute (HRDI) have supported Hmong hemp growing, including work on low-THC varieties. Community enterprises such as the Dao Mang hemp-cloth group in Mae Sa Noi, Chiang Mai, now sell the cloth beyond the village.
Between about 2019 and 2022 the government also promoted hemp as an economic crop. It opened licensed commercial cultivation, and in June 2022 it removed most plant parts other than extracts from the narcotics list.
Hemp fibre is industrial material and separate from cannabis flower. Flower is a controlled herb under the Notification of the Ministry of Public Health Re: Controlled Herbs (Cannabis), B.E. 2568: prescription on form PT 33, at most thirty days per prescription, GACP-certified source, and no online sale or advertising. Fibre is not free of rules either. Under current rules, growing and processing hemp for commercial purposes requires permits; see topic 1330 and topic 50 for the framework, including the two Ministerial Regulations B.E. 2569 that tightened licensing in 2026.
Thailand and Vietnam both have established textile manufacturing. Most countries trying to build a hemp textile industry lack that piece, which is why the opportunity here is specific rather than generic.
If you work in textiles in the region: has anyone sourced hemp fibre or hemp-blend yarn locally, and what did it cost compared with cotton? That single number would tell this community more about whether the industry is real here than any amount of historical argument.
Asiannabis Community educational content on hemp and industrial cannabis. It concerns industrial fibre, not cannabis flower.