Evgeny Skigin: Government Is the Missing Piece for Sustainable Hemp

30th Jul 2026
Ask Evgeny Skigin what single thing would finally unlock industrial hemp as a mainstream material, and the answer comes back in one word: government. It's not the answer most people expect. We prefer stories where a clever product wins on its own merits, where the market rewards the better idea simply because it's better. But Skigin, who has worked in industrial hemp since 2008 and co-founded a Netherlands-based hemp venture, sees it differently after close to two decades in the field. "No industry in the world has ever succeeded without government support," he says. "Not the internet, not oil, not trains, not cars. No important industry has ever made it without government contribution or emphasis." Hemp, in his view, will be no different. Pretending otherwise only slows things down. Why the market alone can't do it To understand his reasoning, Skigin says, you have to look at how industries actually change, which is not the way most people imagine. Every industry runs on established patterns. "You find a material, you make a factory, the factory produces a product, the product gets sold, and people get used to it," he explains. Everyone in the chain is organized around that pattern, and changing the raw material at the very start of it is close to impossible, because it forces everyone downstream to change too. Hemp as a building material, where Skigin has spent much of his energy, is his prime example. "No builder understands what hemp is, no architect understands what it is, and the client in the end also doesn't quite understand it," Evgeny Skigin says. "Even if he wants it, he'll still go with the safe option. You always have to break through a lot of walls to grow." Nobody in the chain is against hemp; it's just that every link has a reason to reach for the familiar material, and those reasons compound. Then there is the pace of agriculture itself, because hemp is a crop before it's a material. Skigin contrasts it sharply with his software ventures. "If a client increases revenue from one million to ten million, the software just handles it," he says. Farming handles nothing on its own. "If I wanted to increase from 1,000 hectares to 3,000 hectares, it would be a massive undertaking — more tractors, ordered a year in advance." Growers plan in November for an April planting, harvest in October, and sell over the following year while already planning the next cycle, permanently working three years ahead. An industry moving that slowly, he argues, cannot bootstrap itself into relevance through market forces alone in any reasonable timeframe. It needs a push. What the push actually looks like Skigin is careful to describe that push in modest terms. It is the ordinary way societies get new industries over the cost curve: subsidies, grants, and carbon credits that let a promising material reach the volume at which it becomes genuinely cost-competitive with the incumbent. Below that volume the new material looks expensive and marginal; above it, the economics flip. Hemp, he argues, is an almost ideal candidate for that kind of support, which is what makes the current gap so frustrating. "It's basically a weed," he says. "It doesn't need pesticides or herbicides. It doesn't require a lot of water. It has a very deep root system. It can grow in Finland and it can grow in Thailand." And from a single crop come fiber for textiles, hurds for construction, and seed with a strong protein and fat profile. "In one crop, you have textiles, housing, and food. That basically covers the base of everything humans need." Yet in most places, he notes, a farmer growing potatoes, wheat, or corn qualifies for support a hemp farmer does not. "You get subsidies for potatoes, wheat, corn — but hemp isn't included, which doesn't make sense," he says. The European varieties grown commercially are registered, with THC content below the legal threshold; this is a farming operation, not a controversy. Leaving it out of the frameworks that back every other staple crop, in his telling, is simply an oversight that policy has been slow to correct. "There is absolutely no reason not to support it." The Netherlands as proof of concept The encouraging development, Skigin says, is that this is beginning to change. He has seen it up close in the Netherlands, where the subsidy gap for hemp has started to close. "That has now changed in the Netherlands," he says. "It should really be EU-wide." The shift matters more than it might sound, because it's the difference between an industry that stays a demonstration project and one that can actually scale. With the right backing, real infrastructure becomes possible. In the Netherlands, Skigin's venture built what he describes as a first of its kind: a prefabricated hemp building production line, where hemp hurd is mixed with lime and water to make hemp concrete, formed into frames, pressed and dried, ready for delivery when a construction site is prepared. "We are the only ones in the world who have done this," he says. Building it took capital, deep technical expertise, and persistence, a combination he notes is rare. "There just aren't that many people like us with the knowledge, the capital, and the experience to implement something like this." That rarity, he argues, is exactly why government backing matters: it lets capital-heavy projects reach the scale where they can prove the model for everyone else. The wider signs are real too. Natural fiber composites are gaining ground; Skigin points to boats now being built from hemp fiber composite, and to hemp materials going into serious buildings, including a museum of modern art in Eindhoven. "There are definitely positive signs," he says. "But there's still a long way to go." What's missing, in his view, is the policy consistency to turn a series of impressive one-offs into industrial-scale production. A modest, specific ask Skigin is careful to frame his position narrowly. He is not calling for grand industrial policy or for governments to pick winners. He wants only for hemp to be treated the way every other beneficial crop already is: included in the subsidy frameworks it's currently left out of, recognized in the systems that already price carbon, and given the same footing as the materials it's competing to replace. The Netherlands has started down that path; the logic, he argues, doesn't stop at a border. That's where his optimism meets his patience. Skigin readily calls industrial hemp a lifetime project. "I'm going to die — let's say at 80, that's another 40 years," he says. "In 40 years, there will still be so much to do in this industry. It just takes that long." Replacing entrenched materials and production processes simply takes decades; he's made his peace with that. But the timeline, he believes, isn't fixed. Sensible policy can compress decades of slow, wall-by-wall progress, and its absence can stretch them out indefinitely. No industry ever made it without government, in Skigin's reading of history. Hemp doesn't need special treatment to get there. It just needs to stop being the exception.