Do You Know Where Your Roses Come From?
Feb. 13, 2014—Boasting springlike temperatures year-round, northern Ecuador has the ideal conditions for growing roses. Supplying nearly a quarter of the roses sold in the U.S., the rose and cut-flower industry in Ecuador is providing thousands of jobs to local residents and keeping families together.
Transcript
We ship from the farm on Friday night, gets on a plane on Saturday morning, goes to Miami and then from Miami it’s trucked all over the United States, and it takes anywhere between one to four days to get to the destinations all over.
We get it here and you’ll see we process, we cut them, and then put them in the water, then they start drinking and growing.
At this shop we will sell about 4,000 roses on Valentine’s Day itself. It’s the single busiest day of the year for our shop, in terms of dollar volume and stress.
Most of them come from Ecuador.
Last year we export to the United States around $660 million of fresh cut flowers. I would say that from that amount, $100 million are roses. Almost one of every four roses are coming from Ecuador.
It’s just the perfect place with eternal Spring-like weather.
Ecuador is one of the very few South American, Latin American countries that export organic roses and Fair Trade roses to the United States.
Well the industry is very important to Ecuador, it creates a lot of employment, a lot of jobs. The industry claims that they provide about 60,000 jobs in my country, in the northern part of Ecuador which borders with Colombia. Particularly for myself, this industry is very close to my heart because 50% of the job creation is for women.
In my 25 years of working in the flower business I’ve seen a tremendous social and economic change in the counties that have flowers. I like producing something in the countryside and having people stay in their own culture with their own families.
I’ve always enjoyed them. They’re kind of addictive. Really brings this...a magic to an interior.
