• by IPS Correspondents (london)
• Wednesday, December 21, 1994
• Inter Press Service

LONDON, Dic 21 (IPS) - Even as the harvesting, sorting and packing of millions of carnations and roses is reaching fever pitch in many Third World countries, storm clouds in the form of a slump in prices due to oversupply are looming over the new export cash crop.

In the plastic-sheeted greenhouses which line the broad, fertile plains around Bogota, Colombia, thousands of workers toil to get them sent to Europe in time for Christmas, where they will form gift bouquets and centrepieces for tables laden with festive foods.

About 40 million carnations and 10 million roses will wing their way to Britain from Colombia during the Christmas season, according to Britain's Flower Import Trade Association (FITA),

It is big business, and it is cut-throat. The British market alone for cut flowers and plants is worth over one billion pounds (1.5 billion dollars) a year.

Colombia, Britain's second biggest source after the Netherlands, is this year estimated to have produced more than 3.5 billion flowers for exports worth over 350 million dollars, says the British charity Christian Aid.

Experts claim many countries saw the steady returns on flowers as an antidote to the wild fluctuations of the coffee market, but now that view could be about to change with a sudden drop in prices predicted.

"New growers are fed the line by buyers that flowers are a get rich quick crop, so they all pile in and plant the bread-and- butter blooms like roses, carnations and chrysanthemums. The result -- a flooded market," says FITA's chairman Anthony McAlister.

Colombia must not only compete against growers in the North, particularly the Netherlands, but faces rivalry from low-wage countries including Kenya, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Turkey, Ecuador and Costa Rica.

And that's not all. India is poised to barge in to the market with heavy investment from its industrial groups, and even Ethiopia, has jumped on to the bandwagon, says David Hughs, a marketing specialist at the Agrarian Development Unit at Wye College in Kent.

Gilroy Coleman of the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia predicts that South Africa, already a producer of good quality roses, is about to step up its exports in a big way. "The infrastructure exists to cope with what is very high tech farming," he says.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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