Is there a business opportunity in industrial hemp between Australia and Hungary?

Scott Cundill · 2026-10-29 · Melbourne

Yes, and it is early enough that the right introduction still counts for a great deal. Hungary has a long, proud history of growing and spinning hemp, and Australia has spent the last decade building the rules, the farms and the machinery for a modern hemp industry. One side has the heritage and a seat inside the European market, the other has fresh land, fresh capital and some clever engineering. Put the right people in a room and the pieces fit.

A very old crop with a very new look

Hemp, *kender* in Hungarian, was once everywhere in Hungary. Villages grew it, retted it in the ponds, and turned it into rope, sacking and linen tough enough to last a lifetime. Then synthetic fibres arrived and the fields quietly went back to wheat and maize.

Today hemp is having a second life. Builders want hempcrete and hemp board, carmakers want natural fibre composites, and food companies want hemp seed and oil. Australia allowed hemp seed foods in late 2017, and its growers and processors have been finding their feet ever since.

What Australia brings

Space, sunshine and a willingness to try new things. Australian growers can scale up fast, and Australian engineers have been busy designing better ways to separate fibre from the stalk, the slow, dusty, unglamorous step that decides whether hemp pays. Machinery and know-how travel well.

What Hungary brings

Experience in the soil and in the factory, and a door into the European Union. A Hungarian partner understands the climate, the farmers, the old mills and the paperwork, and can sell into a market of hundreds of millions of people without crossing a single customs border.

Where it goes wrong

Hemp deals tend to stall in the same places:

- Feedstock. A buyer wants clean, dry, consistent fibre, and a grower promises a harvest that the weather may not deliver. - Trust across distance. Melbourne to Budapest is a long way to send a deposit to someone you have never met. - Language and habit. A Hungarian mill and an Australian start-up can mean very different things by "next week".

Every one of those is easier when someone who knows both sides vouches for each of them.

How do referrals work on this Bridge?

You tell a host the kind of grower, processor, buyer or investor you are hoping to meet. If they genuinely know someone suitable, they write one short note to the two of you, saying why you should talk. Nobody sells lists, and nobody is pushed into a meeting that would not help them.

The Australia-Hungary Business Bridge

Charles Kovess holds the Australian end from Melbourne. He is President of the Australia Hungary Chamber of Commerce and Industry and of the Australian Industrial Hemp Alliance, and CEO and international marketing director of Textile and Composite Industries, which develops hemp processing machinery. Jozsef Szente holds the Hungarian end from Budapest, where he researches the market for industrial hemp. The two have done business together for twenty five years.

Hemp is only one of the doors this Bridge opens, but it is a lively one. If you grow it, process it, build with it or want to invest in it, start by naming the one company on the other side you would most like to meet.