The incomplete coverage of hemp products in trade statistics poses a challenge to gaining a thorough understanding of existing industrial hemp markets, including the valuation of global exports for each specific hemp product.
In international trade statistics, particularly in the UN COMTRADE database using the six-digit level of the Harmonized System (HS) classification, only three hemp-related products are included. Other recognized hemp products, such as hemp seeds, lack dedicated six-digit HS codes.
This implies that a substantial portion of hemp product trade, the extent of which is unknown, remains unaccounted for in international product classifications.
To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the scale and composition of international trade in hemp products, this study explored national sources of trade statistics in addition to the information provided by UN COMTRADE.
The estimated value of global exports of hemp seeds and related products from national sources was approximately US$ 122 million in 2022, while the global exports value for processed hemp textiles products nearly reached US$ 50 million. For comparison, global exports of hemp fibers and yarn recorded in UN COMTRADE amounted to approximately US$ 50 million. This suggests that the magnitude of global exports of hemp products is significantly underestimated by the data available in the latter source.
This Note is organized as follows.
- Section 2 discusses hemp products coverage in national and the international HS classifications.
- Section 3 provides selected yearly and quarterly information about exports of hemp products across three categories: seeds, fibers and processed textiles.
- Section 4 provides some concluding remarks.
