The ethics of flowers
Arroy (AJ) Jacob, Web Editor |
The flower-cutting industry is not an everyday conversation starter but is one of our most underrated economic drivers. We don’t realize how much we rely on these pretty coloured petals on emerald stems.
Nor do we realize how unethical it is.
Floriculture heavily relies on people and its usage for various celebrations and rites of passage, from weddings to funerals and cultural gatherings. In Canada alone, Flowers Canada Growers report that “in 2019, the industry generated $1.566 billion in national farm gate sales, and of that, over $500 million worth of flowers were exported. Nationwide, greenhouse floriculture is the 6th largest crop and the 10th largest agricultural product.”
Flowers and flower cutting racks billions of revenue. However, understanding the basis of what makes the flower-cutting industry so impactful and unethical can help individuals lead the way to sustainable blooming.
Transportation
Flowers are a commercialized commodity, despite how pretty they are. However, transferring and trading them through international markets and associations call for fast and cost-effective shipments. A method of transportation includes shipping them through refrigerated airplane holds— jets that traverse oceans and continents and leave an unfixable trail of carbon dioxide emissions, as with any form of transportation.
However, Ideas.Ted.com reported that in 2018, 360,000 metric tons of CO2 were released into the atmosphere through jet travel to the U.S., the world’s largest consumer of flowers. “To put that into perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to 78,000 cars driven per year.”
The amount of travel made to provide plants that generally do not last longer than a week, in addition to the overwhelming significance of emissions produced each year, and other cons that relate to how easily it contributes to climate change, outweighs any petal’s colour and shape.
People-picking
The Forward Lab interestingly covers the global impacts of floriculture farming. One of their points includes the individuals actually farming the land for flowers. According to their article, Kenya is one of the most prominent nations in terms of floriculture resources. But because of its history with the industry and unregulated labour ethics, “floriculture often uses a workforce of poor, less educated, primarily female workers, meaning that the industry is ripe for exploitation.”
Since most flowers are not edible, the use of chemicals, including pesticides and preservatives, exposes the vulnerable population of workers to a myriad of dangerous working conditions. Ethical and social regulations of how workers are treated when picking flowers for the bride across the world are unrecognized because the floriculture industry itself is unrecognized.
These ethics and considerations are only a few to name when discussing the legacy the industry has provided. These focal points and more can inform those reconsidering ordering their next bouquet.
