How the global Valentine’s Day flower trade is making workers sick — and why nobody wants you to know
“The smell of pesticides could be detected more than two miles away. Workers walked under overhead irrigation systems spraying fungicides on the roses while they were still working underneath them.” — eyewitness account from a Kenyan flower farm
Every February, somewhere around 1.5 billion flowers change hands across the world. Roses, mostly. Red ones. Wrapped in cellophane, bound with ribbon, bought in supermarkets and petrol station forecourts and online florists who promise next-day delivery and no quibble returns. They are the default language of romantic love — convenient, affordable, beautiful, and, for the people who grew them, frequently dangerous.
The story of Valentine’s Day flowers is one of the most persistent and under-reported scandals in global agriculture. It involves chemicals banned in Europe being sprayed on farms in Africa and South America; workers — predominantly women — developing respiratory diseases, skin disorders, and reproductive complications at rates that alarm researchers; infants born with defects; men and women eased out of the industry in their forties, their bodies already worn down by years of toxic exposure. It is, in the bluntest terms, a story about who pays the real price for a £12 bunch of roses.
The Geography of a Bouquet
To understand the problem, you need to follow the flower from seed to shop.
The Netherlands remains the world’s dominant trader in cut flowers, with the Amsterdam Aalsmeer auction handling roughly 12 billion stems annually. But the Dutch mostly trade and distribute; they no longer grow the majority of what passes through their hands. The growing has moved south, to places where land is cheap, labour is cheaper, and environmental regulations are more accommodating.
Kenya has become Africa’s pre-eminent flower exporter, shipping approximately 150,000 tonnes of cut flowers each year — the industry is the country’s third-largest earner of foreign exchange and employs over 500,000 people. The farms are concentrated around Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake northwest of Nairobi, ringed by vast greenhouse operations that stretch to the water’s edge. Colombia, specifically its Bogotá plateau, produces around four billion stems annually. Ecuador — at high altitude around Cayambe and Cotopaxi — exports roughly 160,000 tonnes of flowers each year, with roses forming the bulk. Ethiopia has expanded rapidly, now exporting around 80,000 tonnes, primarily to European markets.
In the United Kingdom, approximately 90 per cent of cut flowers are imported. In the United States, about 80 per cent are brought in from abroad, with Colombia and Ecuador as the two largest sources. The flowers you buy for Valentine’s Day almost certainly did not grow within a thousand miles of where you live.
This matters for one central reason: the chemicals permitted, and the oversight applied to their use, are vastly different in these producing nations than in the countries that consume the finished product.
127 Chemicals and Counting
Since flowers are not classified as food, they fall largely outside the pesticide residue regulations that govern what ends up on your plate. In most countries, there are no legal upper limits on the amount of pesticide residue permitted on a cut flower. It is a regulatory gap that has been exploited with considerable thoroughness.
A landmark 1990 study of Colombian flower workers found that roughly 9,000 people were being exposed to 127 different pesticides in the course of their work. The same research raised concerns that pregnant workers might be experiencing higher rates of premature births and babies born with congenital malformations. Three decades later, the chemical cocktail has not diminished. A 2016 study led by Belgian scientist Dr Khaoula Toumi analysed three species of cut flower — roses, gerberas, and chrysanthemums — and found 107 different active chemical substances, including herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides. The most concentrated of these substances reached levels approximately 1,000 times above the maximum limit that would be set if these were food products.
A separate investigation by Pesticide Action Network Netherlands tested 13 bouquets bought in ordinary shops — tulips, roses, and mixed arrangements. Residues were found in every single one. Across the 13 bouquets, 71 different active substances were identified. Twenty-eight of them — 39 per cent of the total — were chemicals already banned within the European Union. On average, each bouquet carried 25 distinct toxic substances. Two-thirds of the chemicals detected posed risks not only to wildlife and ecosystems, but to the health of the workers who had grown the flowers and the florists who would go on to handle them.
Some of the specific chemicals in use are strikingly alarming. Clofentezine, identified in the 2016 Belgian study at four times the acceptable exposure threshold, has been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as a possible human carcinogen. By 2023, the EU declined to renew its approval because of its endocrine-disrupting properties, which are associated with cancer and birth defects. Other chemicals in circulation on flower farms — methyl bromide, methyl parathion, and historically even DDT — have long been prohibited or severely restricted in wealthy consumer nations, yet have continued to appear in producing countries where oversight is thinner.
The Women Who Grow Your Roses
The human cost lands most heavily on workers who have the fewest resources to respond to it. On flower farms across Kenya, Colombia, Ecuador, and Ethiopia, the majority of the workforce is female — often young women, sometimes supporting families alone, drawn to the industry by wages that, while low by any international standard, may represent the best available option in the local economy.
A 2007 report by the International Labor Rights Fund found that more than 66 per cent of flower workers surveyed in Ecuador and Colombia were suffering from work-related health problems: skin rashes, respiratory conditions, and eye problems linked to chronic exposure to toxic pesticides and fungicides. Research published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that over 50 per cent of workers on fern and flower farms reported at least one classic symptom of pesticide poisoning — headaches, dizziness, nausea, diarrhoea, skin eruptions, or fainting. In Ethiopia, studies have found that 67 per cent of flower workers report at least one respiratory health problem, and 81 per cent experience skin complaints after joining the industry.
The reproductive toll has been documented across multiple studies. Work published in Pediatrics by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Philippe Grandjean found that flower workers experience higher-than-average rates of premature births, congenital malformations, and miscarriages. The 1990 Colombian study raised the same concerns. A Danish study found that the sons of women occupationally exposed to pesticides during pregnancy were three times more likely to be born with reproductive birth defects.
A particular cruelty of the system is the way in which workers are managed out before the worst of the damage becomes the industry’s problem. Investigators writing for the Spanish publication Late — who traced the flower trade from its import hub in the Netherlands to farms in Kenya, Ecuador, and Colombia — found that employers routinely force out workers once they reach their forties, before the cumulative effects of pesticide exposure, workplace accidents, and repetitive strain injuries can be attributed clearly to the job. The industry benefits from the labour; the public health systems of producing countries absorb the consequences.
During Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day peaks, working hours on Colombian farms can stretch to 50 a week. The tasks are relentless and repetitive: cutting, classifying, and assembling hundreds of stems per hour in conditions that experienced workers have compared to factory assembly lines. Many workers do not wear gloves — not because the gloves are unavailable, but because the fine motor dexterity required by the work makes wearing them impractical. The chemicals soak directly into the skin.
The Florist in the Middle
The health risk does not end at the farm gate. Florists — who handle flowers for hours every working day, often for years or decades — represent a second exposed population, one that has only recently begun to attract serious scientific attention.
A 2017 Belgian study equipped 20 volunteer florists with cotton gloves while they worked normally, then analysed the gloves after just two to three hours of handling flowers and preparing arrangements. The researchers detected 111 active substances in the glove samples — mainly insecticides and fungicides — with an average of 37 different chemicals per pair of gloves. One pesticide exceeded acceptable exposure limits by nearly four times. A separate analysis of 90 bouquets found 107 pesticides, and 70 of these substances were subsequently detected in the urine of florists — even those wearing two pairs of gloves — indicating that dermal absorption and inhalation were occurring despite protective measures.
The potential consequences were thrown into sharp relief by a case in France, in which authorities investigated the death of a florist’s child after linking it to pesticide exposure during the mother’s pregnancy. The case prompted Pesticide Action Network Europe to issue a specific warning ahead of Valentine’s Day: “Don’t poison your loved one. Avoid toxic flowers.”
US Customs inspectors examining imported flower shipments wear protective equipment as standard practice. The national association representing florists, however, has historically resisted acknowledging the need for similar precautions among its own members.
Banned There, Sprayed Here
One of the most troubling structural features of the global flower trade is the chemical asymmetry it enables. Because cut flowers are not food and do not need to meet residue standards in the countries that import them, it is entirely legal to grow a flower using chemicals that would be prohibited in the country where that flower is ultimately sold.
This means that a pesticide banned in the European Union for its effects on human health or the environment can be applied freely on a Kenyan or Colombian farm, and the flower grown in that soil can travel to a London or Amsterdam florist without any requirement to disclose the chemicals used in its production. The consumer has no way to know. The florist has no way to know. Even the regulatory agencies in importing countries have no systematic mechanism to test for the full range of substances that might be present.
The WHO’s assessment of chemicals used on Floraverde-certified Colombian farms — operations certified to meet specific social and environmental standards — found that in 2005, 36 per cent of the chemicals being applied were classified as either extremely or highly toxic. This is the industry at its more regulated end. The picture on uncertified farms is considered worse.
The Lake That Pays the Price
The chemical exposure experienced by workers is part of a broader environmental contamination that affects communities far beyond the farms themselves. Lake Naivasha in Kenya — described by researchers as one of the most biologically important freshwater ecosystems in East Africa — has been dramatically degraded by decades of intensive flower farming on its shores.
The lake provides water for the greenhouses; the greenhouses return pesticide runoff and fertiliser leachate to the water table. Research has documented chemical residues in irrigation channels serving indigenous communities in Ecuador’s high-altitude páramo ecosystem. The Water Footprint Network has calculated that a single rose requires between 10 and 18 litres of water to produce when accounting for irrigation, processing, and the dilution of agricultural runoff. Multiply that across the 1.5 billion flowers sold globally for Valentine’s Day, and the figure reaches between 15 and 27 billion litres — enough to supply a city of 100,000 people for several months.
One 2008 report, examining the state of Lake Naivasha, documented that the flower industry had, in the years from 2007, contributed to conditions that resulted in more than 100 deaths and the displacement of more than 300,000 people from the surrounding area.
Certificates, Schemes, and the Limits of Reassurance
The industry is not without its defenders, and it is not entirely without reform. Fairtrade certification, the Florverde Sustainable Flowers programme (operating across Colombia, Ecuador, and several other producing nations), and the Rainforest Alliance standard all aim to improve conditions. Bloom & Wild, one of Europe’s largest online florists, has publicly acknowledged that its industry “still has a problem with sustainability” and that “standards are not high enough when it comes to pesticide and water consumption.” The company is experimenting with sea freight rather than air freight and developing new sourcing standards. The Slow Flower movement in German-speaking Europe promotes seasonal, regional, and sustainably produced flowers as a direct alternative.
These are real efforts, and they have achieved real improvements in specific operations. But they are insufficient at systemic scale. Certification is voluntary. Standards vary. Verification is inconsistent. During Valentine’s Day surges, when production pressure intensifies and output targets expand, shortcuts are most tempting and least scrutinised. Workers on short-term contracts, supplied through intermediary companies specifically to distance the main operation from labour obligations, have little power to refuse exposure or report violations without risking their livelihoods.
The long-term health effects of agrochemical exposure on flower workers remain, as researchers at degrowth.info have noted, critically understudied. The connection between former flower workers and elevated cancer rates in producing regions has not been adequately investigated. The bodies of the women who spent decades growing the world’s Valentine’s roses are not a priority research area.
What a Bunch of Roses Actually Costs
It is worth sitting with the arithmetic for a moment. A dozen red roses in a British supermarket costs somewhere between £8 and £25, depending on the retailer and the date. The same roses, bought in the days before Valentine’s Day, may cost twice as much. The farm worker in Ecuador who cut those roses earns, typically, around $150 per month — roughly £120. The cold-chain logistics, the Dutch auction house, the air freight, the customs broker, the wholesale distributor, and the retailer all take their margins along the way. The chemical exposure, the skin rashes, the miscarriages, the damaged lungs, the early forced redundancy — these costs are externalised entirely, absorbed by individuals and communities in countries that are not in a position to refuse.
The flowers arrive at the supermarket looking immaculate, their petals unblemished by insects, their stems uniformly long. This cosmetic perfection is precisely the point of the chemicals: not food safety, not disease prevention in any serious epidemiological sense, but appearance. The global flower trade is a beauty industry whose supply chain is built in significant part on the bodies of women in the global south.
What Can Be Done — and What You Can Do
The solutions are well understood, even if the political will to implement them at scale is absent. Cross-border pesticide regulations that apply to imported flowers, as they do to imported food, would close the most fundamental loophole. Mandatory disclosure of the chemicals used in the production of specific flower shipments would create accountability. Independent verification of certification claims — rather than self-reporting by producers — would give the schemes that exist some teeth.
For individual consumers, the choices are imperfect but meaningful. Flowers carrying the Fairtrade mark or Rainforest Alliance certification are not ideal, but they represent a documented improvement over uncertified alternatives. Locally grown or seasonal flowers — increasingly available through farm shops, specialist florists, and direct-to-consumer growers in the UK — carry a fraction of the chemical burden and none of the air-freight carbon cost. The Slow Flower movement has demonstrated that demand exists for an alternative model. Buying nothing, or buying something entirely different, is also a choice.
But consumer action alone will not fix a structural problem built into global trade regulation and enforced by the gap between where flowers are grown and where they are governed. The workers in the greenhouses of Naivasha and the high plains of Colombia cannot wait for a shift in consumer preference. They are being harmed now, in the production of a product with a sell-by date of a week, grown to mark a single day on the calendar.
The roses are red. The story behind them is considerably darker.