The beautiful blooms we buy at the supermarket check-out can sometimes have a hidden price.
In life’s big moments, we often reach for a bouquet of flowers, but many of us might not know what it takes to get them into our hands. Many of the flowers sold in Australia have been flown around the world before they get to us, kept in cold containers for hours, or even days.
The blooms might have been grown in a high-tech, carbon-intensive greenhouse in Europe, or at an African mega-farm and often picked by workers making less than the minimum wage. In one bouquet, the grower might make $4 a stem; another farmer will make just 14 cents for each of theirs.
Some of the women harvesting our orders will make just $8 a month, human rights groups say. At the supermarket till, we might not always be buying flowers that are ethical or sustainable.
“The real cost of a rose, in times of grief or great joy, is priceless,” says Frank Oudwater, from Hoek, an international floral wholesaler. But he also wants people to know just how much “blood, sweat and tears go into their product.”
Paying an environmental price
Few handing over their cash for a bunch of flowers at an Australian supermarket would realise their bouquet’s journey often starts here – in Kenya, east Africa.
Kenya’s cool, mountainous climate, with almost year-round sunshine, makes it the perfect place to grow roses.
The freshwater of Lake Naivasha is the lifeblood of many of the country’s largest flower farms, with around 70 per cent of the nation’s growers based in the area.
The lake is also known for its wildlife, including hippopotamus, unique birds and a nearby game reserve home to giraffes and buffalo.
Foreign investors and major multi-national flower companies moved into the region decades ago and created a lucrative industry – but one that’s not always sustainable.
Many countries around the world rely on the supply of flowers from East Africa, including Australia. Cut flowers are now Kenya’s second-largest export, and there’s even a wing at the capital Nairobi’s international airport dedicated to air-freighting blooms abroad. Around 50 per cent of all flowers sold in Australia are shipped in, and Kenya is one of our biggest supplier markets alongside Malaysia and China.
Supply chains in the industry can be extremely long and a single stem can have a significant carbon footprint. Sometimes, flowers grown in Kenya will be exported to a floral wholesaler in another country, before being air-freighted again to the nation where they will finally be sold to the consumer.
Growing them can be an energy-intensive business too. Even in Kenya, where conditions are considered ideal, flower farms can still use significant energy for water pumping, lighting, heating and refrigeration. To keep up with global demand for affordable flowers, masses of blooms are grown in vast greenhouses along the banks of Lake Naivasha.
One of those producers, Austrian-born producer Peter Szapary, started Wildfire Flowers around 20 years ago. Lately, he’s been on a mission to create a carbon-neutral rose. “I didn’t want to sit at a dinner party where someone tells me, ‘You flower producers, it’s completely unsustainable what you do in terms of [the] environment,'” he says.
His plan would see bunches of flowers that “register the carbon footprint on every single product,” he says. He likens it to how a packet of pasta often comes with a label showing how many calories, or how much sugar, the product contains. “My vision is to see a carbon-neutral product separated from the general flowers you can buy.”
In 2020, Peter allowed his farm to be audited for its carbon footprint and has since introduced measures that he says have reduced emissions by close to 40 per cent. He credits that success to installing solar, making natural fertiliser, reducing his agro-chemicals, and stopping ploughing. “To be honest, we were completely in the dark, and that’s one of the reasons we did it,” he says.
But once Peter Szapary sells his roses and they are air-freighted abroad, the journey will generate carbon emissions he can’t control. And his efforts to reduce his environmental footprint are not necessarily helping him to sell flowers, either. “The consumer wants the cheapest,” he says, “which puts the farmer under tremendous pressure.”
Supermarkets buy Peter’s roses for between 13 and 17 Australian cents each, depending on the size of the stem. The supermarkets are extremely resistant to changing their price points, he says, and are more likely to reduce the size of their bouquets than mark up their prices. “Normally you sell a bunch of 10, say, they’d rather pull one stem out and you only sell nine, but [they] keep the price.”
Peter Szapary’s flower farm in Kenya has reduced its carbon emissions by 40 per cent, he says.
Foreign Correspondent: Isabella Higgins
As a Kenyan producer, Peter says he is the “bottom feeder in the value chain” who feels the price pinch. “Our price has not really changed over the last 20 years, but our production cost, including labour, goes up every year,” he says. “That means our margins have gone down.”
When asked, Peter Szapary would not tell the ABC on the record how much he pays his locally employed staff. “I’m sure there’s other farms, and one hears rumours, that other farms pay a lot less,” he says, adding that all his workers are on permanent contracts to give them stability.
Peter’s farm was Fairtrade certified in 2012, which sees 10 per cent from every stem sold reinvested in community initiatives of the employees’ choice, like education and healthcare. He hopes customers will consider paying extra for a more ethical product. “It will cost a bit more, but the consumer needs to be educated,” he says.
The hidden human cost
The battle to keep costs down at the check-out is felt by many Kenyan families who work on the flower farms. The minimum wage in the sector is around 15,000 Kenyan shillings, or $177 a month, says Mary Kambo, a labour rights specialist at Kenya’s Human Rights Commission.
“But we have many farms that are paying way below the minimum wage that is provided by the government,” Ms Kambo says. “I’ve seen pay slips where women are taking home less than $US5 ($8) in a month.”
It is women like Esther, who lives in a small home near Lake Naivasha, who often pick the roses that end up in our homes. The 32-year-old has a message for Australians who are buying bunches of flowers: “On the ground, we are very poor,” she says. “[The flower growers] took us like we are slaves.”
Women make up about 70 per cent of the workforce in Kenya’s flower industry. This is where many of the world’s supermarket roses come from. Esther, a single mother who asked us not to publish her last name, has worked for one of the major growers here for the past seven years. “They don’t care about us,” she says. “We cannot tell them anything … we are not OK. So many people – especially women – in flower farms are single mothers.”
Esther says her monthly salary is around 10,000 Kenyan shillings, which is the equivalent of about $115. After taxes and other statutory deductions, she only takes home $60 a month.
She has also paid for years of work on the farms with her health. “We plant the flowers, and there, they exposed me to the chemicals,” she says. Esther requires treatment for chronic asthma up to four times a week. Her doctors say exposure to pesticides and cold rooms at the farm trigger her attacks.
After they requested she be reassigned, Esther was moved to kitchen duties at the farm to help her stay healthy, but still, she is suffering. “I have a pain in my chest, I cannot do anything in my house, I cannot cook for my kids, cannot wash myself,” she says.
“I’ve seen pay slips where women are taking home less than $8 in a month.”
By the time the flowers from Esther’s employer end up in shops near us, it is often impossible to know where they came from, or who picked them. Some nations have voluntary country-of-origin labelling, or branded ethical certifications for flowers, like Fairtrade. In Australia, this is not required, but some within the global industry are pushing for change so buyers can be more informed at the check-out.
“There has been an intention to improve the conditions of workers in the sector,” says labour rights specialist Mary Kambo. “We’ve seen a few progressive growers or producers of flowers in the sector. But the scale of abuse is still so much that it overshadows the good.”
The Human Rights Commission is investigating allegations of sexual harassment, harmful exposure to chemicals and labour exploitation across Kenya’s floriculture industry.
“Women and men working in the flower sector have that difficult choice, to remain in those jobs even when they pay poverty wages, even when conditions are really, really harmful for them,” says Ms Kambo. But “options are limited,” she says. “There’s always a willing replacement at the gate.”
Some women who work around Lake Naivasha say it is almost impossible to live on a flower farm salary. We spoke to a woman in her early 20s, who asked us not to use her real name, who says she has been forced to make a difficult choice. “I usually go and sell my body,” she says. “My mum, she is a very poor lady and she is a single parent, I don’t have a dad, and I’m firstborn … that’s why.”
Each night in Naivasha town there are young female flower farm workers, many single mothers like her, who are making the same choice. “It’s just young girls in between the ages of 20 and 30 and younger,” she says. “Some are selling their bodies because of men, there are some selling themselves to help their families.”
Sex work can be more lucrative, but it can also be difficult and sometimes dangerous. She breaks into tears as she recounts some of the difficult nights she has “survived.” “One week a person can tell you, ‘Let’s go to my place,’ and you go there maybe, you know, some people even murder people.”
But Mary Kambo says consumers in places like Australia shouldn’t be discouraged from buying Kenyan flowers, which support the local economy and millions of families. “Go out and buy the flowers but ensure that you’re sourcing from a market that is ethical and sustainable, a market that cares about labour rights, women’s rights,” she says. “Buyers have an ultimate role and they have huge leverage that they must continuously use to ensure that the sector is improved.”
An energy-intensive journey
The biggest market for Kenya’s cut flowers is the Netherlands. But it’s mostly just a stopover destination on the way to the final point of sale.
Stems are sold to the industry here at the famed Dutch marketplace, the Royal Flora auction house, which is often considered the flower trade’s global epicentre.
The facility, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, is the size of 200 football fields and sells about 8 billion worth of plants each year.
Many flowers have already been on a carbon-intensive journey to get here, and they’ll again be stored in a temperature-controlled environment until they can be auctioned off.
Once the stock has been sold, it begins the next leg of its journey to florists and supermarkets around the world.
The history of this flower market and its daily auction clock extends back to the early 1900s. “It’s the trading centre of the world for flowers,” says Erik Wassenaar, one of the company’s auctioneers. “Everyone is bringing flowers to the auction. All the world is looking at the clock pricing … and a lot of growers, buyers, use that price as a benchmark for pricing for their flowers.”
“The flower is a luxury product and it costs a lot of energy. Is that always sustainable? I don’t think it is.”
These days the auction house is reckoning with the environmental cost of selling the world’s flowers. “More and more, we get questions from consumers, but also from trade companies; how much gas do you use? How much plastic do you use? What do you do with water?” says, Albert Haasnoot, Royal Flora’s Sustainable Development Program Manager.
The auction house is working to introduce a new sustainability rating system that will assess the environmental impact of each product. “Now it’s very hard to see what really is sustainable,” says Mr Haasnoot. “But we hope that those insights will come within the coming years.”
The FloriPEFCR rating system will assess the environmental life-cycle of a flower against 16 indicators, to give the product an overall score. “You have good examples in the Netherlands, but you have also excellent examples within Kenya … it depends on the grower and on the product.”
One Dutch grower has worked hard to create what is sometimes the auction’s highest-selling rose. Marc Sassen has sold one of his rare varieties for 2.5 Euros, or around $4 per stem. “It’s about the shape and it’s new and it’s different,” he says. “Florists love to have something that is unique.”
His family has been in the flower-growing trade for generations and has managed to stay in business as many Dutch growers closed around them. He says the biggest concern now for businesses is the price of energy. When energy prices are rising, like they have been lately, “it’s almost not possible to grow roses here anymore,” he says.
Marc has decided to scale back the lights and heat used in his greenhouses and now chooses to grow only in the warm months. He has a smaller selling season but tries to breed his own unique varieties that will fetch a higher price for each stem.
Dutch flower grower Mark Sassen breeds unique rose varieties that fetch a higher price.
Foreign Correspondent: Isabella Higgins
“The flower is a luxury product and it costs a lot of energy,” he says. “Is that always sustainable? I don’t think it is. When I grow them and sell them, then it’s out of my hands, where are they going? They can go to Amsterdam, or they can go to New York.”
Experts in the industry have some advice on what to look for next time you are purchasing blooms. If you care about the carbon footprint, Albert Haasnoot recommends buying flowers “within the season, which are grown outside, that don’t need natural gas or heat or light to grow”.
Another well-known Dutch grower, Daan Kneppers, agrees. “The best flower is one grown closest to you,” he says.
Ms Kambo believes the real cost of a rose goes far beyond its financial price. “A woman’s sweat has gone into producing that rose, there’s a male worker working too hard to ensure that this flower reaches the market,” she says. “There’s a whole human being behind that production.”
Watch ‘The Real Cost of a Rose’ tonight on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm on ABC TV, ABC iview and the ABC In-Depth YouTube channel.
