An American environmental activist evading the United States government was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday in Dali for manufacturing drugs, according to a New York Times report.

Former New Jersey resident Justin Franchi Solondz, 30, who had been living in Dali under the name Isaac Cox, was arrested in Dali in March of this year with illegal drugs and faked Canadian identification, the Times reported his parents as saying.

According to Solondz's father, police found more than 30 pounds of marijuana at the apartment he rented in Dali, where it was buried in the courtyard. The prosecutor for the case characterized the inside of the younger Solondz's home as a "drug laboratory", he said.

When finally brought before a court for trial in October, Solondz pleaded guilty to the drug charges he faced and requested deportation back to the US, which he was denied.

After finishing his Chinese prison sentence, Solondz will be deported to the United States where he awaits his arson-related charges.

On the other side of the Pacific, Solondz is on the FBI's wanted list for conspiracy to commit arson, arson of a government building, arson of property used in interstate commerce, use and carrying of a destructive device during and in relation to a crime of violence and making unregistered destructive devices.

The FBI accuses Solondz of being involved with a splinter group of the Earth Liberation Front, a decentralized environmental activist group which the US government declared the top domestic terrorist threat in early 2001. He was indicted in absentia in 2006 for his alleged involvement in a three-state arson spree in the American west in 2005.

It is widely believed that the Chinese and American governments met regarding the case and that Solondz received a relatively mild sentence as a result of US diplomacy. In October of this year, UK citizen Akmal Shaikh was sentenced to death for dealing drugs in Xinjiang in northwestern China.

While standing before judges at the intermediate court in Dali, Solondz praised Dali as a "paradise" and apologized to the people of China for his actions.

Justin Solondz 2002 photo: FBI via New York Times

After years of sometimes confused policy in which industrial hemp was lumped together with its psychoactive cousin marijuana, the Chinese government is now actively promoting hemp cultivation as a tool for lifting rural Chinese out of poverty.

China will build multiple hemp cultivation bases in Yunnan, Heilongjiang, Gansu and Anhui provinces as well as the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia by 2020, a project that is expected to bring three million people out of poverty, according to a Shanghai Daily report citing an official from the People's Liberation Army's General Logistics Department.

Production at one of the first facilities involved in this plan went online yesterday in Menghai County in Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture in southern Yunnan. The hemp fiber processing factory, owned by China Hemp Industrial Holding Co Ltd, has an annual capacity of 2,000 tonnes.

In addition to being used to produce fibers for rope and clothing, hemp can also be used to make paper which is much less damaging to the environment than paper made from trees. Aside from causing deforestation, tree paper is bleached with toxic chlorine bleach. Hemp paper can be bleached with less environmentally harmful hydrogen peroxide.

Industrial hemp can also be used to produce fuel, biodegradable plastics, construction materials and health foods.

The government in Xishuangbanna now provides farmers with free hemp seeds plus technical training. According to the prefecture's party chief Jiang Pusheng, there are nearly 10,000 farmers growing hemp in the area, farmers who through hemp cultivation stand to double their annual income from 2,000 yuan (US$293) to 4,000 yuan.

Image: Baidu