Indigenous Production Trade Alliance teams up with U.S. Hemp Roundtable Advocacy Partners.
Looking to support hemp industries on native and tribal lands while healing the soil, an American-Indian trade alliance is partnering with the U.S. Hemp Roundtable.
“Indigenous people have long suffered the consequences of industrial pollution,” said Tim Houseberg, director of the alliance. “Remediation efforts led by government and land grant institutions have proven inadequate and have failed to build the knowledge and expertise necessary for underserved Indigenous farmers to learn how to clean up their lands independently. Studies on biochar applications and hemp have been proven repeatedly to remediate soils, and the Indigenous Production Trade Alliance (IPTA) is leading the way to gather the data needed to cut through the bureaucracy to get these proven methods into the fields restoring native and tribal lands.”
“Studies on biochar applications and hemp have been proven repeatedly to remediate soils, and the Indigenous Production Trade Alliance is leading the way to gather the data needed to cut through the bureaucracy to get these proven methods into the fields restoring Native and Tribal lands.”
— Tim Houseberg, director of the Indigenous Production Trade Alliance
Established in 2020, the IPTA has been working to combine biochar and sustainable hemp farming in ways that remediate soil in places with known or potential contamination (superfund and brownfield sites). Another goal of the organization is linking together an Indigenous-led supply chain: farmers, processors, manufacturers, researchers, retailers, and marketers. The alliance itself is a subcommittee of the Native Health Matters Foundation.
Houseberg is a co-founder of Native Health Matters, through which he served on a university research team gathering hemp from native land in the Oklahoma territory. The hemp had continued to grow on its own since the 1940s, following the Hemp for Victory program. (During World War II, the U.S. government encouraged farmers to plant hemp for rope fiber. The country needed it to make ropes for the Navy after the Japanese halted fiber exports. Tens of thousands of acres of hemp were grown under the Hemp for Victory program.)
In January 2019, the Native Health Matters Foundation and the board of trustees at University of Arkansas partnered to study hemp’s potential for detoxifying and replenishing soil, the first university-backed study of its kind in the U.S.
The U.S. Hemp Roundtable is a coalition of companies and organizations that advocates for the hemp industry nationwide through education and participation in policy-making processes.
“We look forward to working with the IPTA to help expand opportunities for hemp production within the Indigenous communities,” said Jonathan Miller, general counsel for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable. “The efforts of IPTA strongly align with the initiatives of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable Minority Empowerment Committee (MEC) and furthers our mission to promote economic empowerment for communities of color and minority-owned enterprises. The IPTA will be a strong ally as an advocacy partner and we are glad to have them join us.”