The real cost of a rose
By Isabella Higgins and Reveen Hunjan. ABC Foreign Correspondent. Thursday, 22 August.
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.”
