Bill Could Revive Wilting Flower Farms
Think back to the last time somebody sent you roses. (For some of us, this is a stretch, so think hard.) Perhaps the big bouquet came to your office, all the more satisfying because your colleagues got to see that somebody actually cared enough about you to shell out 65 bucks.
You carried them tenderly to the car, creeping around turns so the water wouldn’t spill onto the front seat, set them lovingly on the coffee table and sat back to watch them go from bud to bloom. But the buds didn’t bloom, and two days later they were dead--smelly little black stubs pathetically bowed at the neck.
Well, there are those who say this is just one more thing you can blame on the federal government.
According to flower experts and some lawmakers, a 1992 bill that lifted tariffs on flowers grown in South America has devastated the California flower market, driving small family farms out of business and flooding America with fresh-cut flowers that travel so far without water they droop before their time.
President Bush signed the bill hoping countries like Colombia might start exporting crops like flowers and stop exporting crops like cocaine.
Now it might seem that wilted flowers are a small price to pay to help stop drugs. But, of course, the price seems higher if you are one of the flower growers who is paying it. And, in any case, critics say the strategy hasn’t made a dent.
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Five years after Bush signed the bill, Colombia is growing more coca leaves than ever while bursting into the heroin market to boot. Meanwhile, Colombians are selling duty-free flowers at rock-bottom prices, and growers say the imports are driving domestic growers out of business at a rate of 10% a year. The drop has slammed California, where more than half of the growers reside.
“We are seeing unbelievable losses in family-owned businesses,” said James Krone, executive vice president of Roses Inc., a Michigan trade association that represents rose growers in the United States and Canada.
A bill introduced last month by U.S. Reps. Sam Farr (D-Carmel) and Tom Campbell (R-San Jose) seeks to reinstate the tariff and rescue what’s left of the California flower trade. The bill is the best hope for flower farmers who are not exactly a tough lobby and who have almost no presence in Washington (not hard to believe, considering they are a bunch of guys who love to grow pompon chrysanthemums).
“A California flower may become as rare as an American-made TV,” Farr sternly warned. “The president should put politics aside and admit that this move to remove Colombian drugs from our streets has failed. . . . While we have given the drug growers ample opportunity to practice a legal trade, they continue to flood our communities with cocaine.”
From the moment it was signed, the Andean Trade Preferences Act seemed to spell nothing but trouble for domestic flower growers, many of them family operations passed from parent to child. One grower closed up last month after 90 years.
“Maybe Mom keeps the books, Junior does something repairing the greenhouse. It’s not only the family income, it’s Junior’s college fund and Dad’s retirement,” Krone said. “And when they are just battered out of business for these kinds of reasons, it indeed seems like we have lost a part of the American dream.”
A devoted lot who take seriously their mission of filling the world with flowers, the growers were not exactly thrilled to be dragged into the middle of an ugly international drug war.
“We don’t like to be associated with that to be honest with you,” Krone said. “We think of ourselves as making a pleasant, happy, sentimental product.”
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Critics of the federal policy say farmers are not the only ones touched by a market suddenly overrun by foreign flowers. Roses cut in Colombia may spend as long as five days getting picked, graded, bundled, then loaded on truck and plane for Miami, where they enter the United States. By the time the consumer gets them, the flowers may have been out of water anywhere from three to five days, not to mention possibly having their stems snipped while unsubmerged, emitting an air bubble that can be curtains for a flower.
“They say they move them in 48 hours, but they can’t. Think about it--the Colombian infrastructure is not exactly efficient,” said Will Carlson of the Floral Trade Council.
The result is not pretty.
“When not in water, they get heat stress, they won’t recover, won’t open. They last a day or so then shrivel up and die. Their heads bend over,” Krone said, adding that all this is hardly the fault of the flower.
“The roses then have a very difficult time providing you with the kind of performance--the vase-life--you are entitled to. Which is five to seven days.”
Flowers that stand up straight for a week?
“Oh, yes,” Krone said affectionately. “They move through whole stages of life, from bud stage to youngster to teen to middle-age, then older age, when they drop their petals--kind of like we do.”
Farr and Campbell have made the bill a priority, though there is expected to be resistance from the Florida delegation, which wants to protect Miami jobs that the imports provide.
But observers say the bill has a decent chance of passing, given that Colombia was recently decertified again by President Clinton for failing to be a good drug-fighting ally.
So the California rose may yet survive. Now if only they would pass a law requiring somebody to send them.
