Unhealthy Flowers: Why Buying Organic Should Not End With Your Food

In recent years conscious consumers have enjoyed a spike in the availability of socially and environmentally responsible products. Worried about sweatshop shoes? Try on a pair of Adbusters' Blackspot sneakers. Concerned that your clothes were made in a dismal factory where the workers are paid starvation wages? Go with an American Apparel T-shirt or a No Sweat hoodie. If pesticide residues on your vegetables and hormone-laced meat are your worry, then head for the organic section at the supermarket. Your morning coffee can easily be fair trade-certified, as can the bananas that you put on your cereal.

But what about the flowers on the coffee table, or the bouquet you were going to buy for Valentine's Day? Where were those stems grown, by whom and under what conditions? What are the sustainable and socially responsible options when buying flowers?

Until now, there haven't been encouraging answers to those questions. Conventionally grown cut flowers are most often raised in chemical-intensive systems that expose workers to toxins that can make them sick -- sweatshops in the greenhouses, you could say. Responsible alternatives have been difficult, if not impossible, to find.

That's about to change. This Valentine's season marks the first time that environmental- and worker-friendly flowers will be widely available to consumers in the United States. A new certification system called Veriflora has been set up to guarantee that your flowers weren't grown under abusive conditions. Most Veriflora-certified producers use organic methods; the rest are expected to provide a plan for how they are reducing chemical use and converting to organic. All must show that they are protecting the safety of their workers. Later this year, TransFairUSA -- the nonprofit agency that certifies fair trade coffee, chocolate and bananas -- is expected to release a fair trade seal for flowers.

But there is a huge obstacle facing these well-meaning efforts: Indifference. Here in the United States, there is not much public awareness of the dangers associated with cut flowers. Consequently, demand for sustainable flowers is almost nonexistent. Flower growers, retailers and activists agree that the desire for organically grown flowers is going to have to increase for the budding organic flower industry to succeed.

"There's a real gap out there in terms of thinking -- people think we should buy organic only if we are eating the product," Josh Dautoff, a sustainable flower grower in Watsonville, Calif., said. His company, Dautoff Exotics, used to be a chemically reliant operation when it was run by his parents. Now Josh, 31 years old, is converting his fields and greenhouses to organic. "It's ironic that people will pay more money for organic food for their dinner plate because they are afraid of chemicals. But then they will buy conventionally grown flowers that are covered in chemicals for the centerpiece of their dinner table. ... And those chemicals will catch up with people. Maybe not through their mouths, but through the water and air."

Greenhouse sweatshops

Cut flowers are big business. The U.S. floral market is a $20 billion-a-year industry that supplies all of our Mother's Day bouquets, condolence baskets and Valentine's roses. The vast majority of the 4 billion flower stems sold in the United States every year come from Latin America, countries such as Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, whose flowers have entered the United States duty-free since the 1980s.

Eliminating import taxes on South American flowers was intended as a way to encourage farmers in those countries to grow something other than coca leaf. An unintended byproduct of the off-shoring of the flower industry has been an increase in the use of chemicals. All flowers that enter the United States are closely inspected for pests and diseases. Because growers fear the high costs of having their flowers fail inspection -- and because consumers expect for their flowers to look immaculate -- they pour on the fungicides and pesticides.