I imagine the people who own the land (ie. farmers) don’t have an interest in it because there isn’t an established industry to process it into products like cloth or rope or paper. This means they would have to buy the equipment not only to harvest / plant but also to process into usable material. If there was a pulp factory that would buy it from them they might plant it, but I doubt that any existing pulp factory would buy it as they would probably have to modify their production process slightly to make it into paper. Essentially it’s the chicken and the egg problem of farmers don’t have a market to sell it to, and factories can’t buy enough to justify converting the production process to use the new material.

No need to oppose it if people are too scared / poor to try it. I also imagine there are better crops than hemp for paper. Lignocellulose (the type of plant matter used to make paper) typically makes up about the vast majority of the total dry matter in most plants. There are probably many other plants that produce the raw material more efficiently on a land and water basis with much less risk of getting outlawed.

I would bet that the processing is actually the much tougher problem to deal with than the growing of the plants as machinery is in general more expensive than plants and land.

It might even be cheaper to produce less plant matter on more lower quality ground than to use less land that is more ideal for growing. But I suspect it is just complacency on the part of the growers and / or paper pulp processors.

Market consolidation doesn’t explain why new materials and processes aren’t being invested in?

Why wouldn’t it? Companies that have invested millions in land and equipment to harvest trees aren’t going to just stop using their equipment and get new equipment / land for a different material on a whim. If it makes them money they’ll keep doing it. No reason to take a potential Billion dollar risk on changing equipment and production processes. Sunk cost fallacy is a real barrier for a big company with millions in assets. They probably won’t change unless they have a competitor producing goods cheaper or a government regulation / tax prompting them too. Changing production practices has a cost that most public companies are too cheap to pay for. They would rather use the money for stock buybacks, exec compensation, and investor dividends.

The market ain’t perfectly efficient, companies don’t care about efficiency if they are making money hand over fist. I imagine it is being done somewhere but it is just on a much smaller scale. If they grow enough they will get offers from big companies to buy them as that is cheaper than actually competing. For hemp there is also the risk that if you get too big they bribe lobby for making it illegal to put you out of business.

I think people underestimate the laziness/complacency of most people / companies, if it works why change it? Any employee has a better chance of being fired for trying to innovate than actually getting rewarded / promoted. Heck I imagine an executive could theoretically also get canned for trying to change the production process if they fail, though I imagine they would just pin it on a middle manager.

I mean it might work with Luigi pic in the background. But we all know that won’t happen.