Your Valentine’s Day Roses Have a Real Climate and Human Cost

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In this op-ed, Angie Jamie explores the climate and labor impact of Valentine’s Day roses.

Over the Valentine’s Day holiday, Americans will send each other over 250 million roses, the vast majority of which, blooming in a rainbow of colors and sub-varietals, grow in a savanna near Bogota, Colombia. Why Colombia? This is partially thanks to the horticulturally-perfect growing conditions there, but also what the Washington Post has described as the colliding forces of U.S. efforts to disrupt cocaine trafficking, the expansion of free trade agreements, and American consumers’ skyrocketing appetite for the luxury of roses at cut-rate prices.

In 1991, in an effort to curb the production of coca, the plant used to produce cocaine, the administration of President George HW Bush passed the Andean Trade Preference Act. Offering an incentive to produce alternative crops, this act dropped duties on agricultural products like flowers for Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Suddenly, a six percent duty tax on imports of roses disappeared, and with it, the rose industry as we know it today, began to blossom.

Since then, the climate impact of this massive shift in rose production away from the United States to South America has exponentially increased. Nearly all imported flowers go through an emissions-intensive journey to preserve the flowers as they journey from their homelands in Colombia to your sweetheart’s office desk; from climate-controlled greenhouses to refrigerated trucks, next onto refrigerated international flights, ultimately finding their way to chilled display cases in flower shops across the country and eventually to your home. The cut flower business is a $34 billion global industry with a staggering carbon impact.

From a labor perspective, the production of cut-roses is equally fraught. According to the International Labour Organization, the floral farm sector in Colombia employs around 130,000 people, with flower farms representing one of the leading sources of employment for women. Yet while 65 percent of Colombian floral farm workers are women, reports from local human rights organizations like the Project for International Accompaniment and Solidarity (PASO) describe discrimination, low wages, long hours, and other abuses.

Here in the U.S., floral sellers face the daunting task of ushering the final step of the journey for those roses. That’s where me, and at different points in time, the rest of my family comes in. I worked as a florist for over five years, as did both of my sisters, and at one point, so did my father. Among the known botanical-centric holidays: Christmas, Mother’s Day, and so on, the relentless demands that Valentine’s Day placed on flower shop workers like myself were particularly brutal.

It was a regular occurrence to be asked to skip school to work extra shifts in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day. And while this was, admittedly, as a high schooler somewhat of a thrill, it also meant days on end of (probably very illegal) 16-18 hour shifts, processing rose shipments from Colombia, packaging and arranging tens of thousands of roses. Once, in cutting a bundle of roses too quickly, I sliced a finger nearly to the bone and had to drive myself to a hospital to have the tendon sewed back together. That fingertip is to this day, not entirely healed.

So when you gaze into the velvety petals of the Valentine’s Day roses you plan to gift your loved one, remember that they grew in the shadow of massive environmental impact, a global war on drugs the U.S. uses to strong-arm Latin American countries into exploitative trade agreements, and the exploitation of underpaid workers both abroad and domestically.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue