The pandemic, the war against Ukraine and more than two weeks of ruinous protests over rising living costs – Ecuador’s flower industry has had to overcome one obstacle after another in recent times.
Rosen, the country’s fourth-biggest revenue stream by sales, earned nearly $1 billion in 2021 alone — a record $927 million in revenue, to be precise.
With hundreds of companies growing 450 varieties of roses, Ecuador is the third largest flower exporter in the world after the Netherlands and Colombia.
But this year’s forecast is unclear after 18 days of sometimes violent mass protests against rising fuel prices that included burning roadblocks and arson and resulted in six deaths.
“The protests meant far greater losses than anything lost during the two-year pandemic,” said Marcelo Echeverria, sales representative for Ecuador for international flower company Dummen Orange.
“That has slowed down a lot of things that were planned, a lot of projects that were planned for the second half of the year.”
The protests, led by a powerful indigenous people group, found cut flowers among the export products targeted by arsonists.
“They are BURNING our flowers,” exclaimed the Expoflores Association of Producers and Exporters on Twitter when the contents of delivery vans were set on fire last month.
“They burn our income and that of our families.”
Expoflores said other flowers, unable to be harvested and transported for export, rotted and ended up in “garbage”.
The government estimated the cost of the uprising at about $1 billion — about two-thirds of which is borne by the private sector, including the flower industry.
“There have been countless losses in relation to flowers that could not be exported (and) damage to private property,” said Socorro Martinez, head of Dummen Orange in Ecuador.
“It was a very sad issue because … it widened the gap between some producers and ordinary people who were part of the community, people who we thought were very close.”
– necessity –
But those who are part of it say the industry is resilient and flowers never go out of style, be it for happy or sad occasions.
“We have experienced many local and international crises. We live in crises, but we know how to deal with them,” said Eduardo Letort, manager of the Hoja Verde company, which produces about 35 million stems of 120 varieties of roses each year.
“It’s been a tough couple of years, but… we’ve managed to adapt” by looking for new markets or making better use of dwindling fertilizer stocks as shortages increased during the pandemic and more recently with the war in Ukraine , he told AFP about his farm in the Andean city of Cayambe.
In 2020, Ecuador’s flower industry recorded sales of US$827 million – a smaller drop than expected before the 2019 pandemic, when it was US$880 million.
“We have seen flowers … become a product of necessity. People wanted colors and scents in their homes,” Letort said.
Demand for flowers for pandemic funeral wreaths also rose sharply.
– more complicated –
Flower exports brought in US$432 million between January and May this year, compared to US$417 million in the same period in 2021.
The rest of the year “looked very good despite Russia (and its war against Ukraine) with forecasts for a decline followed by a recovery by the end of the year,” said Expoflores President Alejandro Martinez.
“But with the protests things seem more complicated now,” he added.
In 2021, Russia was Ecuador’s second largest buyer of flowers after the United States.
Since the war began, Russia’s market share has fallen from 20 percent to 10 percent, said Letort, who is also president of Expoflores in Cayambe.
“The flower business is already complicated, it doesn’t take protests, pandemics or wars to make it complicated,” said Marco Penaherrera, who sends about 120,000 roses to the United States every week.
“It’s a good deal, but it’s complicated.”
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