Flowers don't make everyone happy

Flowers for Valentine's Day, Mother's Day or just because always make for a pretty moment, but they're not a good thing for the planet and for many people in the supply chain.

Why should I look for Fairtrade when buying cut flowers? Growing and harvesting flowers is tough, intensive work, as you can imagine. In many countries of the Global South, flower growing is an important business that provides jobs for a lot of people. Unfortunately, the working conditions and wages are often extremely critical and not rosy at all. When bouquets at discount stores are offered for as little as 2 euros, you can imagine that corners are being cut all over the place. As in the textile industry, it's often the workers who suffer most from it, and awareness of “fair flowers” is still very low compared with the attention paid to other consumer goods like coffee or bananas.

So what should you look for? Or never buy flowers again?

Since it's hard to tell from a flower where it actually comes from and under what conditions it was grown, you should rely on certification labels when buying flowers. Once you start looking out for such labels, you quickly notice that most flowers come from conventional growing.

Fairtrade is always a good place to start for trustworthy labels that most people recognise and can place. Fairtrade-certified flower farms grow their flowers to stricter standards. These include:

• Occupational health and safety: Fairtrade campaigns for permanent employment contracts, freedom of assembly and association, maternity protection and clear working-hour rules. Safety is improved by requiring protective clothing and promoting training on the safe handling of chemicals.
• Strict environmental criteria: The Fairtrade-certified farms have to stick to strict environmental criteria, such as water-saving irrigation, wastewater treatment, and compost and waste management.
• Fairtrade premium for community projects: The importer has to pay an extra Fairtrade premium on top. This goes directly to the workforce, because the Fairtrade premium committee elected by the employees decides where the money is used.
• Step by step towards a living wage: Flower farms certified by Fairtrade have to pay at least the legally required minimum wage. Often, though, the minimum wage is still below a living-wage level. So as not to endanger the farms' competitiveness, farmers are allowed a gradual increase in wages until a living wage appropriate for the region is reached.

When in doubt, better to leave the flowers where they are and give something else instead — like organic seeds to grow yourself.