This is the time of year when our yards and gardens are beautified by flowers. Whether we plant them from seed or pick up flats of bedding plants at the local nursery, we contribute to a huge business that makes money for the seller and brings the satisfaction of lovely smell and colour to the buyer.
Year-round, an even bigger business is the production and sale of cut flowers. Even in the dead of winter, consumers can purchase roses, carnations, chrysanthemums and other cut flowers at any local flower shop or supermarket. While this is a good thing in many ways, there is a price being paid in developing countries for this luxury that we enjoy here.
After the Second World War, Europe became the great grower and exporter of cut flowers. Over the past twenty years, however, European companies such as Unilever, with financial support from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, have moved this agricultural industry to the Third World. Kenya, in East Africa, is now the leading exporter of cut flowers to the European market, with India not far behind. In Kenya, cut flower production is now the second-leading industry, behind tea, and is growing while other sectors of their economy stagnate.
This relatively new industry is creating some economic security for thousands of floraculture workers, most of them women, but it is also a source of growing environmental and health concerns. Knowing that Western consumers are very picky about how their flowers look, large amounts of virulent pesticides are used on flower crops. While pesticide use on food crops is somewhat regulated, this is not true of chemical use on flowers. Thus, workers are victims of very poor labour health conditions. Pesticide use is also having an effect on Kenyan wildlife populations.
Another environmental effect is desertification caused by the huge amount of water needed to supply the flower industry. Hundreds of thousands of litres of water are used daily from freshwater Lake Naivasha in Kenya, effectively now beginning to empty that body of water, dropping 15 cm per year.
A continent away in India, the acreage of flower greenhouses has quadrupled in recent years around Bangalore, Bombay and Delhi. India is the third highest debt ridden country in the world, behind Mexico and Brazil, and sees the cut flower industry as a way to dig itself out of its economic and social predicament. Unfortunately, while Indian people earn moderate wages in hazardous conditions, it is the entrepreneurial class and multinational corporations that earn the large profits. As in Kenya, land given over to export crops is land taken away from food crops. The best land is used for flowers, coffee, tea and cotton for export while much less fertile land is left for the people to grow their subsistence gardens.
High inputs of chemicals and continuous and intensive cultivation of flowers will eventually lead to sterile soil. As well, the flower industry is not efficient in returning a benefit to India and its people. Each acre planted requires an investment of inputs and labour that is beyond what other development strategies might yield. The international flower market is thought to be volatile at this time, too, as the quick profits of the industry have led to global overproduction. Should the market collapse, Third World communities will be hurt the most.
The so-called “Green Revolution” has been a process promoted and implemented by agencies of the United Nations, various Western countries’ aid programs, universities and corporations since the 1960s. Developing countries have been encouraged to use agrichemicals and hybrid seeds to increase yields to export crops for foreign exchange and to feed their own people. Unfortunately, this has often enriched the companies and better-off classes while impacting negatively on ordinary people, particularly in concentration of land ownership and dangers to health. The cut flower industry is another manifestation of Green Revolution-thinking.
The good news for flower growers in Kenya and India is that Western consumers are becoming more sensitive to environmental and social issues. Labour and environmental practices are becoming business issues as North Americans and Europeans look for more organic and fair trade products. This is forcing some producers to begin to switch to natural pest management and to train workers in the use of hazardous products, but there is still a long way to go in this regard. In pun-like fashion, the Indian flower industry says it offers a “rosy” future to its people, but those who see the downside to international floriculture say “there is no rose without a thorn”.
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