FARMS GO TO POT FOR HIGH PROFITS

LIVESTOCK farming has gone to pot. A European Union scheme which pays
$500 a hectare to British farmers to grow cannabis is proving more
attractive than rearing sheep or cattle. Dozens of farmers in East
Anglia, Wales and the West Country have already turned over some of
their fields to the 10ft plants, which are used for making cigarette
papers, animal bedding and industrial fibre.

Cannabis is a controlled drug in Britain and the farms are visited by
a Home Office drugs inspector, who checks that the site is secure
before granting a licence. Under government rules the crop must be
grown away from roads so as to deter would-be marijuana-smokers from
raiding the fields.

The scheme is described as lunacy by Eurosceptics, who point out that
the crop would be uneconomic without the Brussels subsidy. Farmers,
however, are delighted to have discovered an escape route from the
collapsing livestock industry, which in the past fortnight has seen
bull calves abandoned in telephone boxes and sheep dumped with the
RSPCA.

William Roffe-Silvester, who farms 130 acres in Devon, last year
turned over 17 acres of grazing to cannabis. Before the change he was
losing money rearing beef cattle. Now, he says, he is making a healthy
profit.

"I've got plans to grow more next year, and if the [livestock]
situation gets worse I would be looking to go into the hemp in a
bigger way," he said. "Many of my neighbours are also looking at it."

Livestock farmers are not normally allowed to claim subsidies for
growing crops on land converted from grazing, even if they sell all
their animals and change their entire farm to arable growth. However,
a quirk in EU regulations makes cannabis an exception, along with
flax, another crop used in the production of paper and fibre.

As a result, cannabis cultivation has become the fastest-growing EU
agricultural scheme in Britain in recent months. The area under
cultivation has grown from almost nothing in the early 1990s to at
least 2,500 hectares today. Across Europe, 22,000 hectares of cannabis
were grown in 1997, the last year for which the EU has produced
figures. The cost to European taxpayers was $11m.

However, there is little demand for cannabis sold legally on the open
market. Without subsidy, each hectare of cannabis would fetch between
$240 and $480. With seed costs at nearly $190 per hectare, farmers
would be left with no profit without the EU incentive.

None the less, the plant has a growing fan club among Britain's
eco-elite. Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop which sells a range
of toiletries and cosmetics that is based on cannabis, described it as
"the wonder-crop of the century".

Harvested cannabis sativa, also known as hemp, is bought in Britain by
a company called Hemcore, which also supplies seed to all the 80 farms
now growing the crop.

The cannabis strain being grown is of low narcotic potency. However,
government drugs inspectors conduct random tests to ensure that
farmers are not substituting their own more powerful varieties.