To Ecuador, With Love

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Americans love the symbol of love. We buy more than 1.5 billion roses a year, most of them from Colombia (9 million) and Ecuador (4 million). We used to buy domestically grown flowers, but the climate and low costs of South America began to draw growers in the early 1980s. This led to more toxic bouquets as Latin American growers doused their flowers with chemicals banned in the United States.

Workers, who are mostly women, bore the brunt of this practice. Many showed signs of toxic poisoning, according to several studies. They were rarely trained to use toxins and often given inadequate equipment.

Working conditions were also an issue. While Ecuador’s official unemployment rate hovers in the 10 percent range, the ranks of the “employed” include everyone who works part time, down to the child shining shoes in the plaza in Quito. About 45 percent of the population is under­employed, and the average annual income is about $2,870, according to the World Bank.

Rose growers employed children, pushed employees to work long hours, and refused to offer vacations, sick pay, or maternity leave. They eventually began to get bad press, and social activists pressed for reforms. There are now various certification programs sponsored by Colombia, the flower industry, and nongovernmental agencies, leading inevitably to some confusion for shoppers. TransFair USA, which has the support of such groups as Oxfam America and Global Exchange, is trying to become the “gold standard” for certification.

The idea, then and now, is to persuade growers that a fairer farm is profitable. Across the marketplace, Europeans have embraced fair trade much more quickly than U.S. citizens. The question, then and now, is whether customers in the market with the most potential, the United States, will ever make working conditions a continent away a factor in deciding which rose to buy.

Patrick Busch runs the United States’ only rose farm outside of California, in a suburb of Minneapolis. When his family first got into the business, 80 percent of his roses were grown domestically. Now that figure is about 15 percent; the rest come from non–fair trade farms in Colombia and Ecuador. So he’s both a farmer and an importer.

Busch’s costs to grow in the United States are about $25 per square foot, several times the cost in Ecuador, and he pays his workers $15 an hour. A worker on a Fair Trade Certified farm in Ecuador earns perhaps $5,000 a year, plus benefits.

“The public awareness of organic and fair trade is certainly increasing, but no [customer] ever asked for organic or fair trade until this year,” says Busch. “The problem with fair trade is that a lot of farms are already doing many of the things [fair trade] farms are [doing], and I don’t know if the money is really getting back to people and making a difference. I’m afraid it’s more of a marketing tool than anything else.”

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