Inside France's Industrial Hemp Boom, Europe's Biggest Grower

September 4, 2026

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Drive through the Aube or the Marne in July and you'll see it before you can name it: tall, dense green stands that look nothing like a vineyard or a wheat field, swaying in blocks that stretch for hectares. That's French hemp country, and there's more of it than anywhere else in Europe. France has held the title of the continent's top hemp grower for years running, and globally it sits in second place, behind only China. It's not a marginal crop grown by a handful of holdouts either -- somewhere between 1,550 and 1,850 producers are working this land, spread across roughly 22,600 to 24,600 hectares depending on which year and which count you're citing.

Now the industry wants to nearly double that footprint. InterChanvre, the body that speaks for French hemp growers and processors, has set a target of around 45,000 hectares by 2028, arguing that textile and construction demand simply can't be met at current output. That's an ambitious ask for a five-year window. And it sits alongside a fact that complicates the picture of French hemp dominance: despite growing more raw hemp than any other European country, France still imports 80 to 85% of the CBD it actually sells at retail. Two industries, same plant, very different stories -- and that tension is worth digging into.

How Big Is France's Hemp Industry, Really

France's hemp acreage stood at roughly 22,600-24,600 hectares in 2024, but the country aims to nearly double that to 45,000 hectares by 2028.

Pin down an exact number for French hemp acreage and you'll get a different answer depending on who's counting and when. One recent tally puts 2024 figures at 1,850 producers working 24,600 hectares. Another, using a slightly different reference year or methodology, lands closer to 1,550 producers on 22,600 hectares. The gap between those two counts isn't a scandal -- it's just what happens when you're measuring a crop where registration timing, crop-year definitions, and reporting bodies don't always line up perfectly. What both counts agree on is the scale relative to everyone else on the continent: France alone accounts for more than half of all hemp acreage cultivated across the entirety of Europe.

Zoom out further and the picture holds. Among hemp-growing nations worldwide, France ranks second only to China, which dwarfs every other producer by sheer land mass and government-backed cultivation programs. That puts French growers ahead of Canada, ahead of every other EU member state, and ahead of the U.S. hemp sector that emerged after federal legalization of domestic cultivation there.

Yet InterChanvre's leadership doesn't sound satisfied with second place globally or first place in Europe. Speaking in November 2024, InterChanvre president Franck Barbier said plainly that French hemp surfaces need to roughly double within five years just to keep pace with demand -- not from the CBD sector, notably, but from textile manufacturers and construction firms increasingly interested in hempcrete, insulation, and fiber-based building materials. Barbier's stated target, close to 45,000 hectares by 2028, would push France's share of European hemp acreage even higher than it already is, assuming other producing countries don't scale up in parallel. Whether processing capacity and farmer recruitment can move that fast is the harder question, and one the industry hasn't fully answered yet.

Who Runs the Trade: InterChanvre, FNPC, and the Seed Cooperative

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French hemp isn't a loose collection of independent farmers selling into whatever market will take their crop -- it's an organized, vertically structured trade with its own governing body. InterChanvre has functioned as the official interprofession for French hemp since 2003, meaning it holds formal recognition from the state to represent and coordinate the sector, negotiate on its behalf, and set technical standards. It isn't just growers at the table. InterChanvre brings together the Fédération nationale des producteurs de chanvre (FNPC), which represents the farmers themselves, alongside six industrial processors who turn raw stalks and seed into fiber, hurd, and grain products.

Underpinning all of that is seed supply, and in France that runs almost entirely through one channel: the Hemp-it cooperative. Hemp-it pools 155 seed producers who between them cultivate 17 registered hemp varieties, and it supplies the overwhelming majority of the seed that goes into French industrial hemp fields each spring. That concentration matters because it gives the sector tight control over genetics -- and by extension, over THC compliance, since seed variety is the first line of defense against a crop drifting over legal limits.

Only varieties listed on the EU Common Catalogue of Varieties of Agricultural Plant Species are legal to plant in France, a rule that applies across the bloc. In practice, French fields are dominated by a handful of names growers and agronomists know well: Futura 75, Fedora 17, Santhica 27, Santhica 70, and Felina 32, each bred for specific fiber, grain, or dual-purpose characteristics.

One structural point is worth underlining because it explains a lot of what follows in this piece: since January 2024, InterChanvre formally excluded flowers from its scope of activity. That wasn't a new posture so much as a hardening of a long-standing separation -- the fiber-and-grain trade InterChanvre represents has never wanted to be lumped in with the flower and CBD market, and the 2024 move drew a clean administrative line between the two.

The 0.3% THC Line and How It's Enforced

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Every hemp-growing country needs a legal ceiling on THC to distinguish industrial hemp from marijuana, and France's line has recently moved. Industrial hemp grown in France must now stay under a 0.3% THC threshold, raised from the previous 0.2% cap through a 2025 amendment to the Arrêté du 30 décembre 2021, the ministerial order that governs hemp cultivation conditions. The change wasn't France going rogue -- it aligns the country with EU Common Agricultural Policy Regulation 2021/2115, which set 0.3% as the bloc-wide reference threshold for hemp eligible for CAP support payments.

Compliance isn't left to the honor system. The Agence de Services et de Paiement (ASP), the public body that also handles agricultural subsidy payments, tests roughly a third of France's hemp parcels every August for THC content. Sampling happens in the field, at a point in the growing cycle when THC concentration is considered most representative, and a parcel that fails can put a grower's CAP eligibility and legal standing at risk.

The THC threshold governs cultivation, but a separate and arguably more consequential legal fight settled what happens to the plant after harvest. On December 29, 2022, France's Conseil d'État -- the country's highest administrative court -- issued ruling n°444887, striking down the government's blanket ban on selling raw hemp flowers and leaves that tested below the 0.3% THC line. That decision followed an earlier EU-level ruling in the Kanavape case, which found that member states couldn't simply prohibit CBD products lawfully produced in another EU country, a decision that rippled across the bloc and pushed several member states to loosen their own restrictions on hemp flower and leaf sales.

All of that said, French hemp and CBD regulation has changed multiple times in just the past few years and shows no sign of settling. Anyone growing, selling, or buying hemp products in France should check the current rules directly rather than relying on any single snapshot, including this one.

Exports Are Booming While the Tax Fight Rages On

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On paper, French hemp exports look like a straightforward success story. Shipments hit close to 48,000 tonnes in the 2023/2024 season and held roughly steady at a similar level through 2024/2025, with 72% of that volume going to buyers elsewhere in the EU -- Germany, the Netherlands, and other fiber and construction markets chief among them. That's a raw-material trade built on fiber, hurd, and grain, largely separate from the flower and CBD business that generates most of the sector's political controversy.

And there's been plenty of that lately. On the night of November 19-20, 2025, the National Assembly voted to strip article 23 out of the 2026 finance bill. That article, had it survived, would have imposed a 25.7% excise tax on hemp and CBD products, treated them under the same tax regime as manufactured tobacco, and restricted their sale to licensed tobacconists -- a move that would have effectively wiped out the independent CBD shop model that's grown up across French towns over the past several years. Retailers and hemp advocacy groups had lobbied hard against it, and for now, they've won that round.

The regulatory pressure hasn't disappeared, though -- it's just shifted target. The Agence nationale de sécurité du médicament (ANSM) has kept up a steady drumbeat of bans on synthetic cannabinoids, issuing decrees against compounds like HHC, HHCP, THCP, and H4-CBD in June 2023, again in June 2024, and most recently through a further order dated January 16, 2026. Each ban closes off a synthetic workaround that had briefly filled shelves after the previous one.

Here's the part that undercuts any simple narrative of French hemp self-sufficiency: despite growing more raw hemp than any other European country, Confédération paysanne, the French farmers' union, reported in November 2025 that 80 to 85% of the CBD actually sold in France is imported, chiefly from Switzerland, Spain, and the Czech Republic. France grows the plant; other countries process and finish the CBD product that ends up on French shelves.

Strip away the acreage figures and export tonnage, and what's left is a country running two separate hemp industries that happen to share a Latin name. One is InterChanvre's world: organized, EU-aligned, focused on fiber and grain, exporting steadily to neighbors who want hempcrete and textile inputs, and increasingly confident enough to petition for a near-doubling of farmland within five years. The other is the flower and CBD trade -- legally validated by the Conseil d'État, tolerated but closely watched by ANSM, and still dependent on Swiss, Spanish, and Czech processors to fill French retail shelves despite France's own farmers growing more raw hemp than anyone else on the continent.

The 2026 finance bill fight is a useful marker of where things stand. CBD retailers dodged a tobacconist-style clampdown this time, but the fact that a 25.7% excise tax and a tobacco-style sales restriction made it as far as a National Assembly vote shows the political appetite for tightening this space hasn't gone away -- it just missed this round. ANSM's rolling bans on synthetic cannabinoids tell the same story from a different angle: regulators are working through the loopholes one compound at a time, and there's no reason to expect that list stops growing.

The more interesting question sits on the fiber side. If InterChanvre actually reaches 45,000 hectares by 2028, France's lead over the rest of Europe doesn't just hold -- it widens considerably, assuming Germany, the Netherlands, and other producers don't scale up at a comparable pace. What's genuinely unresolved is whether that growth in raw cultivation finally builds out the domestic processing and CBD retail infrastructure needed to close the import gap, or whether France just keeps growing more of a crop that gets finished somewhere else.