A rose is beautiful but a greenhouse with thousands upon thousands of roses, a place producing millions a year, is not
Decades ago, the flower industry in Colombia was promoted as the replacement for another agricultural export crop, coca leaves and the cocaine made from them. The substitution was a failure – coca cultivation continues in remoter places – but a vast flower industry with its own problems has grown up in Colombia, which raises 80% of the roses sold in the US, along with many other kinds of flowers for export. The first air shipment of flowers for the US took off in 1965. The country is now the world’s second largest exporter of flowers, and the industry, which employs about 130,000 Colombians, is the leading source of jobs for women in Colombia. A similar industry in Africa feeds the European flower market.
My friend and guide, union organizer Nate Miller, had written a report on the Colombian flower industry in 2017, but he had never been able to get inside one of the factories or plantations or farms or whatever the term should be for these strange places. To our surprise, I was able to talk or rather email our way into visiting one of the rose factories, or plantations, or sweatshops in 2019. Upon our arrival, we were escorted to a sort of boardroom from which you could see a lunchroom with workers already in it – most start work very early in the morning – and told a few things that confirmed that the managers here were proud of their enterprise and somehow thought that we would be impressed.
Adapted from Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)
