The Bloom and the Burden
A Global Investigation into the Hidden Costs of the Cut-Flower Industry
Every year, the world buys more than seventy billion cut flowers. They arrive on anniversaries and at funerals, in hospital rooms and on kitchen tables, in the hands of lovers and at the feet of altars. They are among the most traded agricultural commodities on earth. And almost nobody who buys them knows anything about where they come from, who grew them, what it cost to make them perfect, or what happens to the land and the people left behind when the petals fall.
This investigation follows the global flower trade from the high valleys of the Andes to the equatorial plains of East Africa, from the labour camps of South Asian wholesale markets to the heated greenhouses of northern Europe, and finally to the auction floors and supermarket buying desks where the price of beauty is set — by people who will never meet the workers who make it possible.
Valentine's Day, Everywhere at Once
On the morning of February 13th — the single most important day in the global cut-flower calendar — something extraordinary happens simultaneously in at least a dozen countries.
In Cayambe, Ecuador, rose cutters who began work at 3 a.m. are completing their second harvest cycle, their headlamps bobbing between rows of blooms in the pre-dawn dark. In the Rift Valley of Kenya, workers at vast carnation and rose plantations are loading refrigerated containers destined for Nairobi's international airport. In the greenhouses of the Westland region in the Netherlands, robotic arms and human hands work side by side, sorting stems for the Amsterdam auction that will set the global price for the day. In Colombia's Sabana de Bogotá, trucks carrying millions of stems are already backed up for kilometres on the road to El Dorado airport. In Ethiopia's Ziway flower zone, south of Addis Ababa, workers who earn less than two dollars a day are loading the same flowers that will sell for twelve euros a bunch in a Parisian street market.
And in the wholesale markets of India — largely invisible to the Western trade that dominates global floriculture reporting — millions of domestic marigolds, jasmine strings, and roses are moving through distribution networks that serve a flower economy larger, by volume, than most people in Europe or North America know exists.
All of these supply chains share certain features. They are built on low-wage agricultural labour, disproportionately performed by women and, in many countries, by members of ethnic or caste minorities with limited access to legal protection. They are chemically intensive in ways that independent research consistently links to serious, long-term health consequences for workers and surrounding communities. They operate within regulatory environments that have been shaped, to a significant degree, by the industries they are meant to regulate. And they terminate in consumer markets — in Europe, North America, Japan, and the Gulf states — where the regulatory standards governing chemical residues on flowers are dramatically lower than those applied to food, because flowers are not eaten.
What connects the Andean rose grower, the Kenyan carnation packer, the Ethiopian harvest worker, and the Dutch auction trader is a supply chain of extraordinary global reach and almost complete opacity. This is the story of that supply chain: how it was built, who profits from it, who pays for it, and what it is doing to the land and the people it passes through.
Ecuador — The High-Altitude Factory
The road into the Cayambe region climbs steeply from Quito, winding past eucalyptus groves until it crests a ridge and reveals one of the most startling agricultural landscapes in the Americas: thousands of white plastic greenhouses stretching across the high valley floor and spilling up the volcanic slopes, their translucent roofs catching the Andean light like fields of snow.
Ecuador is the world's third-largest cut-flower exporter and the dominant global supplier of premium long-stemmed roses, a position built on a combination of genuine agronomic advantage and structural exploitation. The country's high-altitude equatorial climate — intense sunlight, cool nights, rich volcanic soil — produces roses of exceptional quality: stems sixty to eighty centimetres long, blooms that remain vibrant for three weeks in a vase. The Cayambe region alone accounts for three-quarters of national rose production, and more than two billion stems leave Ecuador every year.
The agronomic advantages are real. The labour model is the other side of the equation. Ecuador's minimum wage is approximately $482 per month, and most flower workers earn at or close to that floor. Indigenous Kayambi women constitute the backbone of the workforce, from planting through to packing, and are systematically paid less, exposed to greater chemical hazard, and afforded less legal protection than their formal employment status would suggest.
Patricia Catucuamba and her husband Milton Navas, dairy farmers who pivoted to rose growing five years ago, represent the smallholder experience: real revenues, real costs circled in red, and a structural position that leaves them price-takers in a market they cannot influence and chemically dependent on an industrial model they cannot fully afford to replicate.
"Diversification isn't just a strategy," Catucuamba says in the greenhouse she built on borrowed capital. "It's survival."
The chemical question in Ecuador is well-documented. An Austrian environmental study of sixteen European rose bouquets found traces of seventy-nine distinct pesticides, forty-nine of which are classified as endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, or acute health hazards. Research by Dr. Jose Suarez of the University of California, San Diego, tracking more than five hundred adolescents in the Cayambe region over nearly two decades, has found statistically significant associations between pesticide exposure and reduced neurocognitive performance in children, with measurable spikes around the Valentine's Day and Mother's Day harvest peaks. His more recent work identifies elevated depression scores — more pronounced in women than men — among those with higher organophosphate exposure.
"The risks of the heavy use of agrochemicals extend beyond workers, affecting entire rural communities," Suarez says. "Their suffering is structurally invisible to the supply chain."
Water defines the other great conflict. The Granobles River and the valley's aquifer system are shared between large plantations and smallholder communities, and the priority rights system systematically favours the large users who established claims earliest. Navas counts the hours each week that irrigation is cut off from his farm — three twelve-hour periods — while the plantations downstream draw continuously from the same shrinking canals.
Colombia — The Origin Story
Long before Ecuador dominated the premium rose market, Colombia was the country that showed the world what a tropical-altitude flower industry could look like. And it still is, in many respects, the template for everything that followed — both the extraordinary export success and the persistent human and environmental costs.
Colombia is the world's second-largest cut-flower exporter and the largest supplier of cut flowers to the United States, with a market share of around sixty percent of US flower imports. The industry is concentrated in the Sabana de Bogotá, the high plateau surrounding the capital at 2,600 metres, and in the Antioquia region around Medellín — areas whose climate, like Ecuador's, produces quality that competitors at lower altitudes cannot match. More than 6,000 flower farms operate across Colombia, employing approximately 130,000 direct workers and, by some estimates, supporting the livelihoods of up to a million people when indirect employment is included.
The industry's origins lie in a deliberate policy intervention. In the late 1960s, American economist Edgar Merkle identified the Sabana de Bogotá as an ideal location for commercial floriculture and helped establish the first export-oriented flower farms, backed by US development assistance and, eventually, by the preferential trade access that would formalise under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act. The logic was explicit: the trade in legal agricultural exports would, it was hoped, provide an alternative livelihood to coca cultivation in a country already consumed by the narcotics economy.
Whether this aspiration was realised is debatable. What is not debatable is that Colombian floriculture became one of the most significant agricultural export industries in Latin America, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue and transforming the Sabana de Bogotá into a landscape of greenhouses nearly as total as Cayambe.
The labour record of Colombian floriculture has been the subject of persistent documentation by trade unions, NGOs, and researchers since the 1990s. Workers — predominantly women, often from displaced rural communities — have reported systematic exposure to pesticides without adequate protection, pressure to meet productivity targets that require overtime hours not recorded in official payroll, and routine dismissal when they become pregnant or attempt to exercise union rights. Colombia's flower industry has long permitted the use of short-term contracts that reset periodically, preventing workers from accumulating the seniority rights that would make dismissal more costly for employers.
Pesticide use in Colombian floriculture mirrors the Ecuadorian pattern. The regulatory framework does not apply food-crop residue limits to ornamental flowers, and the chemical inputs required to produce the consistent, flawless blooms that export buyers demand — fungicides, insecticides, growth regulators, post-harvest preservatives — are applied in regimes that independent researchers have associated with elevated rates of pesticide poisoning, skin and respiratory conditions, and neurological symptoms among workers and community members.
María*, a former carnation packer at a large Sabana de Bogotá farm who requested her full name not be used, describes working for three years in conditions she now understands as chemically hazardous, though she was not told so at the time. "You knew the smell was strong," she says. "You knew your eyes watered. You didn't know you were being poisoned, because nobody told you and there was no protection given."
She left the industry after developing persistent skin conditions. She did not receive compensation.
Kenya — Africa's Flower Factory
The flight from Nairobi to Amsterdam takes approximately eight hours. A rose cut at dawn in the Rift Valley can be in a Dutch wholesale auction by the following morning, and on a supermarket shelf in Birmingham or Berlin within thirty-six hours of cutting. This logistics chain — built on the cargo capacity of African hub airports, the cold-chain infrastructure of equatorial flower zones, and the processing capacity of the Amsterdam auction system — has made Kenya the world's fourth-largest cut-flower exporter and by far the largest flower-producing country in Africa.
The Lake Naivasha region, approximately ninety kilometres northwest of Nairobi, is the heart of Kenyan floriculture. The lake itself sits at the floor of the Rift Valley at roughly 1,800 metres, surrounded by the kind of volcanic soils and equatorial high-altitude climate that horticulturalists have learned to associate with premium flower production. The first large-scale export flower farms arrived in Kenya in the 1970s, many of them Dutch-owned, attracted by the same combination of agronomic quality and low labour costs that would later drive investment in Ecuador and Ethiopia.
Today, the Lake Naivasha area is home to dozens of large flower farms, several of them among the largest such operations in the world, employing thousands of workers and producing millions of stems weekly. The largest operations — companies like Oserian, Flamingo, and Sian Roses — have invested significantly in infrastructure, including their own power generation, water management systems, and, in some cases, Fairtrade and other certifications.
The certification story in Kenya is more developed than in Ecuador, and the results are correspondingly more complex. Kenya accounts for a disproportionate share of the global Fairtrade-certified flower trade — far more than Ecuador, though still a small fraction of overall production — and some researchers have found that certified farms in the region genuinely offer better pay and working conditions than uncertified competitors. The Fairtrade premium, paid on certified sales and directed to worker-elected committees, has funded schools, health clinics, and water infrastructure in some Lake Naivasha communities.
But the certification story is not uniformly positive. Enforcement is uneven. The gap between certified and uncertified farms is real but narrower than certification advocates sometimes suggest. And the fundamental structural tensions of the industry — low wages relative to the value of the product, chemical exposure, water competition, gender inequality — are present in certified and uncertified operations alike, differing in degree rather than kind.
The water crisis at Lake Naivasha has attracted more scientific and journalistic attention than almost any other environmental consequence of the global flower trade. The lake, which is the primary water source for the flower farms and for the surrounding communities, has experienced dramatic fluctuations in level over the past three decades, driven by a combination of reduced rainfall, increased abstraction for agricultural use, and the altered hydrology produced by clearing the papyrus wetlands that once filtered the lake's water and regulated its shoreline. Studies have documented significant declines in fish stocks, which represent the primary protein source and livelihood for thousands of local families who have no connection to the flower industry. Hippo populations, which depend on stable water levels and shoreline vegetation, have declined sharply. Water hyacinth, which thrives in the nutrient-rich runoff from flower farms, periodically blankets large portions of the lake surface, suffocating aquatic life below.
The flower industry is not solely responsible for Lake Naivasha's environmental pressures — smallholder farming, livestock grazing, and general population growth in the watershed all contribute — but it is the largest single user of lake water and the most economically powerful actor in the catchment, which shapes its relationship with regulators accordingly.
"The farms came to where the water was," says Dr. Benson Ochieng, an environmental scientist at Egerton University who has studied the Lake Naivasha ecosystem for fifteen years. "Now the question is whether the water will remain where the farms are."
For the women who make up the majority of the farm workforce — many of them migrants from other parts of Kenya, living in farm-provided housing that creates a dependency relationship with their employers that complicates their ability to contest working conditions — the environmental crisis is experienced primarily as a water and food security problem. When the lake level drops, the fish are gone. When the farms reduce production during slow export periods, the workers lose overtime income. The ecosystem and the labour system are tied together in ways that neither government regulators nor international buyers have fully reckoned with.
Ethiopia — The Newest Frontier
If Kenya represents the established African flower economy, Ethiopia represents its frontier — a country that, in less than twenty years, has gone from almost no presence in the global flower trade to the position of the world's fifth-largest exporter, a transformation of breathtaking speed driven by the deliberate industrial policy of successive Ethiopian governments, the investment appetite of foreign floriculture companies seeking the lowest available wages, and the specific comparative advantages of the highland areas surrounding Lake Ziway in the Rift Valley.
Ethiopia's flower industry began in earnest in the early 2000s, when the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi identified floriculture as an ideal vehicle for rapid export diversification and foreign exchange generation. Land was leased to foreign investors — primarily Dutch and Indian companies — at rates that international observers described as extraordinarily cheap. Labour costs at the time were among the lowest in Africa; Ethiopia's minimum wage for agricultural workers, where such a minimum exists at all, remains among the lowest on the continent. The Ethiopian government provided infrastructure support, duty-free access to imported inputs, and the kind of direct state facilitation of investor establishment that most other flower-producing countries do not offer.
The results, in terms of export volume and foreign exchange earnings, have exceeded the projections of early advocates. Ethiopian flower exports now generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and the industry employs an estimated 160,000 workers, the vast majority of them women between the ages of eighteen and thirty from rural communities with limited alternative employment options.
The results in terms of labour standards and environmental outcomes have been considerably less impressive.
Worker organisations and international labour monitors have documented a persistent pattern of violations at Ethiopian flower farms: wages that frequently fall below even the inadequate legal minimums, mandatory overtime during peak periods that is uncompensated or compensated at flat rate rather than the legally required premium, widespread reports of verbal abuse and gender-based harassment by supervisors, restrictions on workers' freedom of movement during working hours, and systematic intimidation of workers who attempt to organise or contact external labour monitoring organisations. The Ethiopian government, which has maintained a complex and sometimes openly hostile relationship with independent trade unions since the political transformations of the post-Derg period, has not been a reliable enforcer of the labour rights that its own laws nominally guarantee.
Pesticide use in Ethiopian floriculture has attracted particular concern from researchers and international health organisations. The regulatory infrastructure for monitoring chemical use in agriculture — inspection capacity, laboratory testing, enforcement mechanisms — is significantly less developed in Ethiopia than in Ecuador or Kenya, meaning that the already inadequate oversight that characterises floriculture globally is even thinner here. Workers report being directed to handle chemical inputs without protective equipment, not because such equipment is unavailable everywhere in the industry, but because it is not provided and there is no practical mechanism compelling employers to provide it.
Tenaye Alemu, a researcher at Addis Ababa University who has studied occupational health in the flower industry, describes the situation with careful precision. "We find the same chemical exposures, the same health outcomes, the same reproductive health concerns that have been documented in Ecuador and Kenya. We find them in a context where the worker has fewer rights, less access to healthcare, less ability to leave, and less ability to speak about what she is experiencing." She pauses. "The industry came to Ethiopia because labour was cheap and regulation was minimal. Those remain the conditions under which it operates."
The Lake Ziway environment, meanwhile, is exhibiting the same trajectory that Lake Naivasha followed a decade earlier. Water abstraction for flower irrigation has increased dramatically. The lake's level fluctuates with the demands of the farms. Pesticide and fertiliser runoff has altered the chemistry of the water in ways that affect the fisheries that local communities depend on. The pattern is so consistent across different countries and different lakes that researchers have begun to describe it as a predictable feature of the flower industry's relationship with freshwater ecosystems, rather than a series of unfortunate coincidences.
The Netherlands — Where Price Is Set
In a vast, climate-controlled hall on the outskirts of Aalsmeer, a small town twenty minutes from Amsterdam Schiphol airport, the global price of beauty is set every morning before most of Europe has finished its first coffee.
Royal FloraHolland is the world's largest flower auction, processing approximately twelve billion cut flowers and plants annually, representing roughly one-third of all internationally traded cut flowers. The Aalsmeer auction alone — one of four sites — is housed in a building so large that it ranks among the largest commercial structures on earth by floor area. Its interior is a functioning logistics miracle: climate-controlled corridors, automated trolley systems carrying coded lots, banks of buyers sitting before screens that display the descending-price clock that gives the Dutch auction system its name.
The clock starts high and ticks down. The first buyer to press a button wins the lot at whatever price the clock shows at the moment of purchase. Speed is everything. Relationships between buyers, growers, and trading companies have been built over generations. The system is extraordinarily efficient at price discovery — it aggregates global supply and demand information with a precision that no other commodity market quite matches — and it is also, critics argue, a mechanism through which the structural power of buyers and processors relative to producers is maintained and reproduced.
The Netherlands does not grow the majority of the flowers it trades. Dutch companies — growers, traders, distributors, logistics specialists, and breeding companies — occupy strategic positions throughout the global flower supply chain, from the plant genetics that underpin rose varieties grown in Ecuador and Kenya to the wholesale infrastructure that channels those roses to European supermarkets. The Dutch floriculture cluster, centred on the Westland and Aalsmeer regions, is one of the most sophisticated agricultural technology and logistics ecosystems in the world, and its commercial power extends far beyond the country's borders.
This creates a somewhat paradoxical situation. The Netherlands is the world's largest exporter of cut flowers by value — not because it grows the most flowers, but because it processes, packages, re-exports, and adds value to flowers grown elsewhere. Dutch companies set standards, establish varieties, dictate quality specifications, and ultimately determine the prices at which Ecuadorian, Kenyan, and Ethiopian growers sell their product. They do this within a domestic regulatory environment that is, by global standards, rigorous on both labour and environmental standards — while the supply chains they govern operate in environments that are not.
"The Dutch flower trade benefits from global regulatory arbitrage without having to be explicit about it," says Dr. Petra de Boer, an agricultural economist at Wageningen University. "The quality standards flow downstream to the growers. The regulatory standards do not. That asymmetry is fundamental to why the industry works the way it does."
The Amsterdam auction is also the primary mechanism through which the seasonal peaks of the flower calendar — Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas — translate into the production surges that drive pesticide application rates in Ecuador and depress hourly wages in Ethiopia. The auction's price signals cascade through the supply chain in real time, and the response of producers to those signals — more chemical application to guarantee blemish-free product during high-value peaks, more pressure on workers to achieve volume targets — is as predictable as the calendar itself.
India — The Invisible Giant
The global cut-flower industry as understood in Western financial reporting and consumer consciousness is largely the story of temperate flowers — roses, carnations, lilies, chrysanthemums — traded through the Dutch auction system or imported directly into North American wholesale markets. This story is real and important. It is also profoundly incomplete.
India is the second-largest producer of cut flowers in the world by volume, and the first in terms of the sheer number of people whose livelihoods depend on floriculture. The Indian flower economy is primarily domestic — serving the enormous demand generated by religious offerings, wedding ceremonies, festival garlands, and everyday household decoration that is embedded deeply in Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Jain cultural practice — but it is also a significant and growing export industry, particularly in the market for marigolds, jasmine, tuberose, and the roses that supply both domestic and export demand.
The floriculture workforce in India — estimated at several million people — is among the most diverse, dispersed, and poorly documented in the world. It includes large commercial operations in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Maharashtra that produce for export; medium-scale farms that supply urban wholesale markets; smallholder cultivators who grow flowers on fragments of land as a cash crop alongside food production; and the vast, almost entirely informal network of street vendors, market workers, and garland makers who transform raw flowers into the finished products that reach the end consumer.
Across this diverse landscape, certain patterns recur. Women and members of lower-caste communities perform the majority of the labour, at wages that frequently fall below official agricultural minimums. Chemical use is poorly regulated and less well-studied than in the better-documented export supply chains of Latin America and East Africa. Occupational health data for informal flower workers — the garland makers who work in cramped market conditions, the street vendors who handle chemically treated stems for extended periods — is almost nonexistent.
The Dalit communities who dominate certain segments of the flower labour market in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh face the intersection of caste discrimination and occupational hazard that researchers in other contexts might describe separately. Here they are indivisible: the same social structures that assign Dalit workers to the least desirable and most chemically exposed tasks in the flower chain are the structures that prevent those workers from seeking legal redress, accessing healthcare, or exiting the industry.
"We do not have the data on pesticide exposure among informal flower workers in India that we have for workers in formal export supply chains," says Dr. Ananya Krishnamurthy, a public health researcher at the Indian Institute of Public Health in Gandhinagar. "But the absence of data is not the same as the absence of harm. It reflects who gets studied and who does not. It reflects whose suffering counts."
Israel and the Occupied Territories — A Geopolitics of Roses
The global flower trade has always had political dimensions, but few supply chains make them as explicit as the flowers grown in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
Israel is a significant producer and exporter of cut flowers, with a sophisticated domestic industry centred on the Arava desert valley and the Negev highlands. Israeli flower technology — drip irrigation systems, climate-controlled greenhouse management, advanced plant genetics — is exported globally, and Israeli agronomists and companies are present in flower industries from Kenya to Vietnam. The domestic industry benefits from research infrastructure, government support for agricultural technology development, and access to the European Union market under trade agreements that have been the subject of persistent political controversy.
A portion of Israeli flower exports originates in settlements in the occupied West Bank — a fact that has led to ongoing disputes with the European Union, which requires settlement produce to be labelled differently from produce grown within internationally recognised Israeli borders. The labelling dispute has not been consistently enforced, and flowers from settlement greenhouses have reached European consumers without clear indication of their origin.
Palestinian flower production, centred in the Gaza Strip, tells a different story. Before 2007, Gaza had a functioning cut-flower export industry — small by global standards, but significant to the local economy and the families it supported. The blockade imposed on Gaza after the Hamas election victory of 2006, and tightened dramatically after 2007, has effectively ended Gaza's flower export capacity. During brief periods of limited export permission, Gazan flowers have reached European markets. For most of the period since 2007, they have not. The greenhouses remain in some areas, maintained by farming families who have nowhere to sell what they grow.
The geopolitics of the flower trade surface in other contexts as well. The Russian market for cut flowers — substantial before 2022 — has been disrupted and rerouted by the sanctions response to the invasion of Ukraine. Ecuadorian flowers that would previously have been routed directly to Moscow now travel via Kazakhstan, which has emerged as a re-export hub; the flowers are the same, the paperwork is different, and the practical effect is that the global flower trade continues to serve Russian consumers while Western governments maintain the formal position that economic pressure is being applied.
The Regulatory Vacuum
At the centre of every national story in this investigation — Ecuador, Colombia, Kenya, Ethiopia, India — sits the same structural absence: a regulatory framework that treats flowers differently from food, and in doing so creates a space in which chemical application regimes that would be illegal for consumable products are routine, documented, and largely unremarked upon.
The logic of the distinction is not entirely absurd. Flowers are not eaten. The primary exposure pathway for end consumers — even those who handle flowers regularly — is skin contact and inhalation of residues that are present in small quantities on a finished product. This is genuinely different from the direct dietary exposure that food regulations are designed to prevent.
But the distinction has three significant problems. First, it completely ignores the exposure of workers and communities in producing regions, who are not in contact with finished retail products but with the industrial application of these chemicals at rates and concentrations that are orders of magnitude higher than any consumer will encounter. Second, it ignores the environmental exposure of communities that live near flower-producing areas, whose water, air, and soil are affected by the chemical regimes of the greenhouses around them. Third, it creates a market signal that rewards producers who apply more chemicals to achieve more perfect flowers, and penalises those who accept the blemishes and variability that lower chemical input regimes inevitably produce.
The consequence of this regulatory design is that the full cost of producing a perfect rose is not reflected in its price. The health costs borne by workers in Cayambe and Naivasha, the environmental costs borne by Lake Naivasha and the Granobles River, the neurodevelopmental costs borne by children growing up near greenhouse zones in Ecuador — none of these appear in the supply chain accounting that determines what a supermarket pays for a bunch of roses, or what a consumer pays at the checkout.
Dr. Ana Lucia Endara, an environmental law scholar at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, has spent a decade studying the regulatory architecture of Ecuador's flower industry. "The standards that European consumers take for granted in their food do not cross the border with the flowers," she says. "The European Union imports flowers under rules it would never accept for tomatoes or strawberries. The gap is not accidental. It reflects decades of industry lobbying, and it has never been politically costly enough to close."
The Austrian Global 2000 study of European retail bouquets — seventy-nine pesticide residues across sixteen bouquets, forty-nine of which are classified as acutely hazardous or chronically harmful, three-quarters containing chemicals banned for food use in the EU — represents one attempt to make the invisible visible. It has attracted media attention. It has not yet produced regulatory change.
"The problem," says Dr. Suarez from San Diego, "is that the people who are most harmed are not in the room where the regulations are written. They are in the greenhouse in Cayambe or by the lake in Kenya. They don't have lobbyists. The industry does."
Certification — Promise and Limits
The response of the global flower trade to the evidence of harm accumulated over several decades has been, in significant part, certification: the creation and proliferation of voluntary schemes — Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, GlobalG.A.P., MPS, Kenya Flower Council, and many others — that purport to verify that certified farms meet minimum standards for worker safety, fair compensation, environmental management, and pesticide use.
Certification is not nothing. In Kenya, where the Fairtrade programme has operated longest and with the most resources, there is credible evidence that certified farms offer meaningfully better conditions than uncertified competitors, and that the Fairtrade premium has funded real infrastructure improvements in worker communities. In the Netherlands, MPS (Milieu Programma Sierteelt) environmental certification has provided a mechanism for tracking and reducing chemical inputs on Dutch domestic production. These are real achievements.
But the limits of certification as a solution to the structural problems of the global flower trade are also real and well-documented.
Coverage is thin. Only 0.1 percent of Ecuadorian rose exports carry Fairtrade certification. Global Fairtrade flower sales represent a small fraction of the overall market — concentrated in certain retail chains in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland that have made certified sourcing a commercial commitment. Most flowers sold in most markets carry no certification, and no certification is required.
Enforcement is uneven. Third-party audits are scheduled in advance, creating preparation opportunities for farms that know how to present themselves. Workers are sometimes coached on audit responses. The physical areas of farms where pesticide application occurs are sometimes excluded from auditor access. The gap between what audits find and what workers report when approached independently and confidentially is, in multiple documented cases, significant.
Standards vary. The proliferation of certification schemes has created a landscape that confuses buyers and consumers and in some cases enables a form of standards arbitrage — farms can choose the certification scheme whose requirements best match their existing practices, rather than selecting for the most rigorous available standard.
And fundamentally, certification works within the market, not above it. It cannot raise wages across the industry if uncertified competitors maintain lower wages and use that cost advantage to undercut certified producers on price. It cannot impose pesticide restrictions that would price certified product out of a market where uncertified alternatives are cheaper. It provides information and creates some pressure for improvement; it does not change the underlying economic structure that generates the problems it seeks to address.
"Certification is a market instrument," says Dr. de Boer at Wageningen. "Markets are good at some things. They are not good at internalising costs that fall on people who are not party to the transaction. The worker in Cayambe who bears the cost of pesticide exposure is not party to the transaction between the farm and the supermarket. The lake ecosystem that bears the cost of water abstraction is not party to the transaction. Certification can nudge the transaction, but it cannot substitute for regulation."
The Netherlands in Winter — A Counterpoint
It would be misleading to suggest that the global flower industry consists only of export-oriented developing-country production feeding the auction system. The Netherlands, for all its role as a trading and logistics hub for global flower flows, also produces a significant quantity of flowers domestically — roses, chrysanthemums, gerberas, and a range of other species, grown in the largest concentration of climate-controlled greenhouse agriculture in the world.
Dutch greenhouse floriculture operates in an entirely different regulatory environment from the industry's developing-country supply chains. Labour is protected by comprehensive employment law, enforced by an inspection regime with real teeth. Pesticide use is regulated by standards that, while less stringent than the food-crop equivalent, are meaningfully more restrictive than in Ecuador or Ethiopia. Environmental standards for greenhouse discharge are monitored and enforced. Wages are substantially higher: a Dutch flower worker earns in a day what an Ethiopian flower worker earns in a week.
The Dutch domestic industry is also substantially more energy-intensive than tropical-country production. Heating vast greenhouses through northern European winters requires enormous quantities of natural gas — a dependency that has become economically and politically fraught since Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupted European energy markets. The carbon footprint of a Dutch-grown rose in February is substantially higher than that of the same rose grown in Cayambe and airfreighted to Europe — a counterintuitive finding that the Dutch industry's marketing materials have been quick to publicise in other directions, and that complicates straightforward "buy local" advocacy for flowers.
The Dutch situation illuminates, by contrast, what the global flower industry might look like if the regulatory and labour standards of the consuming countries extended to the supply chains they depend on. It would cost more. It would produce less. It would require consumers to pay prices that reflected the real costs of production. Whether that outcome is achievable through market pressure, regulatory change, or some combination remains the central political question of the global flower trade.
The Price of Beauty
In a market stall near Aalsmeer, a Dutch florist is arranging a Valentine's Day display. The roses are deep red, long-stemmed, perfectly uniform. She arranges them with practiced efficiency, trimming stems at an angle under water, spacing blooms so each is visible. She knows her customers. She knows what they want: perfection, abundance, the assurance that the gesture is adequate to the feeling.
She does not know Patricia Catucuamba in Cayambe, or the woman in the Sabana de Bogotá who left the industry with persistent skin conditions and no compensation, or the workers at Lake Ziway who have watched the water level drop year by year, or the children in the Rift Valley whose blood carries measurable traces of chemicals applied to flowers that left Kenya before the children were tested.
These are not unusual gaps in knowledge. They are how global supply chains work. Distance — geographic, cultural, regulatory, economic — is not an accident of the flower trade. It is one of the trade's principal products.
The seventy billion flowers the world buys every year are grown, cut, cooled, freighted, auctioned, packed, transported, retailed, purchased, unwrapped, and placed in water within a system designed to make their origins invisible and their costs uncountable. The system is extraordinarily efficient. It is also, by the evidence accumulated in a generation of research across a dozen countries, built on foundations of chemical harm, water depletion, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation that are not reflected in the price tag attached to any retail bouquet anywhere in the world.
The flowers are beautiful. The question that the researchers, the advocates, the certification bodies, and, occasionally, the regulators are asking — imperfectly, incrementally, against the resistance of an industry whose lobbying power is commensurate with its economic scale — is whether beauty that costs this much to produce, and charges this little at the register, is beauty that the world can afford.
On a kitchen table in Cayambe, the imperfect roses — untreated, unblemished by chemistry, grown for the family rather than the export market — sit in their jug and slowly open. They are not the roses the world buys. But they are the roses that tell the truth about the ones it does.
This investigation drew on reporting conducted in Ecuador, Kenya, and the Netherlands, as well as interviews with researchers, workers, industry representatives, and policy advocates in multiple countries. Where workers are quoted without full names, their identities have been withheld at their request. Governments and industry bodies in Ecuador, Ethiopia, and Colombia did not respond to requests for comment. The government of Kenya's Ministry of Agriculture provided a written statement noting the importance of floriculture to the national economy and the government's commitment to sustainable and ethical production standards.
THE GLOBAL FLOWER TRADE — KEY FACTS
The world buys approximately 70 billion cut flowers annually. The Netherlands is the world's largest flower exporter by value, though much of its trade involves re-exporting flowers grown elsewhere. Colombia supplies roughly 60% of US cut-flower imports. Ecuador is the world's third-largest cut-flower exporter; its roses represent 66% of national flower output. Kenya is Africa's largest flower exporter and the world's fourth-largest. Ethiopia has become the world's fifth-largest flower exporter in less than twenty years. India is the world's second-largest flower producer by volume, primarily for domestic consumption. Less than 0.1% of Ecuadorian rose exports carry Fairtrade certification. A European study of sixteen rose bouquets found residues of 79 distinct pesticides; 75% contained chemicals banned in the EU for food use. Flower workers in Ethiopia earn less than $2 per day; in the Netherlands, workers earn roughly 20 times that figure for equivalent hours. Research in Ecuador tracking 500+ adolescents found measurable neurocognitive impacts from seasonal pesticide exposure spikes around Valentine's Day and Mother's Day harvests.
