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Going the extra mile for your flowers

By: Kurt Tabler

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We love flowers in the home, to give them as presents and to adorn churches at weddings but where do our flowers come from?

Flowers were grown locally in the UK until a few decades ago. Back then flowers were only really given as gifts on certain occasions such as Valentine''s and Mother''s Day. If there were flowers at home, chances are they were hand picked from the garden.

But as more and more people wanted flowers without the ability to grow them themselves, the flower industry blossomed and became highly profitable. This led to the development of domestic greenhouses. But it soon became too expensive to produce flowers on a large scale in the UK, so the international flower trade began.

Countries around the world began to specialise and carve a niche as a flower grower. As far as the UK and Europe was concerned, most flowers came from Holland, where a large-scale picked flower industry was developing.

Costs were still high however, as heating and irrigation costs sky rocked as our appetite for tropical flowers grew. Furthermore, due to the short life span of flowers once they have been picked, most have to be stored in cooled containers for travel and transported via plane.

So, the developing countries, with warmer, tropical climates, saw an opening. They didn''t need to spend vast sums of money on creating artificial greenhouse conditions, they had the real thing.

Countries as far afield as Kenya, Israel, South Africa and Ecuador have been carving a name for themselves in the international cut flower industry ever since. But in the beginning, life as a flower grower in the developing world was far from ideal.

Middlemen would only pay farmers, labourers and factory works a small wage for their work in flower cultivation, but they would then charge consumers a high price for having tropical flowers all year round. This kept the developing world in poverty, and trade was definitely not the same as aid. Many of the huge farms were owned by foreign multi-nationals too, so the money the companies earned stayed in the developed world, and did nothing to help the local communities.

Fairtrade changed all this. It arranges agreements between producers and sellers so that farmers get a fair wage for their work and market price for their products. The Fairtrade premium also means the local community as a whole benefits from the Fairtrade good, i.e. flowers.

Buying flowers in London can help the lives or ordinary people in the developing world, so everyone is a winner.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Kurt Tabler is a writer and horticulturalist. They recommend Interflora for flowers London.

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