character length of content

I'm importing products from .csv file, and there is a field that contains descriptions. These descriptions are being cut short, and it seems that it is only reading (importing) a certain amount of characters.

I see the function used is fgetcsv, and that the link in the documentation brings me to a page that says fgetcsv has a length variable.....

-length

Must be greater than the longest line (in characters) to be found in the CSV file (allowing for trailing line-end characters). It became optional in PHP 5. Omitting this parameter (or setting it to 0 in PHP 5.0.4 and later) the maximum line length is not limited, which is slightly slower.

When I looked in the module code, I found this line:

$length = variable_get('node_import_csv_size', 10000);

and changed that to 20000 but no difference (I cant believe thats 10,000 characters anyway) and tried 0 as it is supposed to set no limit... although that caused a big delay followed by an error.

Any advice how to extend the character length taken in?