STORY by STEPHANIE GARRY
PHOTOS by GINGER LARSON
LA ESPERANZA, Ecuador – Patricia Imbaquingo, a short young woman with a soft face, can buy 25 long-stemmed roses for 80 cents from the flower farm where she works clipping blood-red blooms six days a week.
But she doesn’t.
Imbaquingo, 20, walks two hours to and from her job at the Fiesta Flowers rose plantation, where she earns a little more than a dollar an hour. As long as her job exists, she will use her wages to pay for courses to earn a high-school diploma and to pay off a stereo she bought last year. She’s tired, and she’s tired of looking at roses.
For her and the approximately 40 other employees at this independent farm outside Ibarra, Ecuador, roses are not a symbol of beauty or a show of wealth as they are in the United States. They are a living.
“I think this is the best thing I can do,” Imbaquingo says, softly.
The problems and promises of Ecuador’s flower industry are as many-layered as a rose bloom. This tiny country has gained about 60,000 jobs since the industry began two decades ago, but workers endure dangerous pesticides and low wages to keep their steady jobs. Worst of all, tenuous relations between this South American country and its biggest market – the United States – threaten to wipe out floriculture altogether.
Juan Jose Noboa, the owner of the farm, worries about this constantly: “If the rose industry goes down here, 1 million people go down with it.”
Inside each of Noboa’s three greenhouses, a half dozen people clip flowers and prune their rows. Filtered light, muffled sounds and the dripping of water make the greenhouses feel like a rainforest. Propped up by split tree trunks and wires, the 6-foot rose bushes grow straight toward the sun, which hovers year-round directly over this equatorial country. At the base of each row is a little patch of chamomile, traditionally thought to keep pests away.
It’s here, and down the hill in a processing warehouse, that Fiesta Flowers employees clip and package 8,000 blooms a day for shipping to Russia, the United States and Europe.
Most of the farm’s workers say they’re grateful for their jobs.
“There are not many places to work other than rose farms,” says one.
For women, who make up 70 percent of the flower industry’s labor force nationwide, working in plantations may be the best thing they can do. Some farmers prefer women, saying they have a careful touch that cradles the delicate blooms.
The women at Fiesta Flowers say almost universally that the only work for them is to sell their embroidery and do housework. Both pay far less than Ecuador’s minimum wage of $180 a month.
Nelly Pinto, 25, works in post-harvest, tightly bundling the flowers into rectangular bouquets. She used to sell her handicrafts at the nearby Otavalo market but now earns enough to help support her parents, buy herself clothes and save money to send her 4-year-old son to school.
“It’s closer to my house, and the salary is good,” she says.
Pinto and some others enjoy working with flowers. Clipping and processing is light labor. Martha Tamayo, a 44-year-old mother of three, is proud of her work and enjoys caring for the plants. She used to be a kindergarten teacher, but lost her job because she didn’t have a degree.
“I just do my job the best I can,” she says. “If I could study, I would like to study agronomy. I think that is my true vocation.”
But jobs here carry dangers. Roses are one of the most susceptible types of flowers to pests and disease. Because they’re not an agricultural product that's grown to eat, importing countries don’t place strict standards on the pesticide residue they contain. The result is that pickers and processors are exposed almost daily to toxic chemicals.
Yellow-suited and gas-masked workers spray a cocktail of pesticides on each bush three times a week. The greenhouses are supposed to be vacant when the suited sprayers march through, but on a recent Friday, Carlos Utreras, 41, wore a surgical mask and gathered stem clippings when they started spraying. The father of three said he had to clear the aisles before the fumigators could pass, but they didn’t wait for him to finish.
Almost every worker, when asked about the pesticides, says the same thing: Son muy fuertes. They’re very strong.
Short-term side effects of pesticide exposure include headaches, dizziness, eye problems and stomachaches – all symptoms reported on the Fiesta Flowers farm.
Long-term side effects include cancer, loss of vision and respiratory problems. Although employees are told to be careful, they say the managers have never told them why.
That’s a sharp contrast from labor laws in the U.S., which require workplaces to post notice of the hazards employees could be exposed to. On other farms in Ecuador and especially Colombia, where governmental regulations are stronger, farmers take better care of their employees’ health.
“It’s not common,” said Jose Botia, an agronomist with 25 years' experience in floriculture. Noboa recently hired him to clean up the farm, and Botia promises to educate workers about the dangers of working there. “Other farms follow the rules better.”
Botia, a Colombian with a crewcut, a concerned brow and an ever-present clipboard, hopes to apply his country’s standards and practices to Fiesta Flowers. “If they are doing it there (Colombia), then I can come here and make it done that way,” he says.
But Ecuador’s flower industry has its own concerns. The airport in Quito is located so high in the Andes Mountains that planes taking off there can carry only a fraction of the cargo they could elsewhere. The delicacy of roses means the cost of farming them is much higher. Holes in the greenhouses must be repaired. Safer pesticides are about 10 times as costly as the more harmful ones. Even selecting varieties to plant can be risky, as they go in and out of fashion.
“It’s a lottery,” says Diego Jarrin, the sales manager of the farm. “You choose a kind of flower and plant it. If it’s good, you sell it. If not, you change it.”
But all these hassles are nothing compared to the death knell now sounding for the industry.
On the Fiesta Flowers farm, where black-and-white cows meander on sloping hills, the U.S. seems impossibly distant. But 70 percent of the farm’s harvest is shipped there. If Ecuador doesn’t work out a free-trade agreement with that country soon, many in the industry fear its annihilation.
At the end of 2006, a free-trade pact between the U.S. and Andean nations will expire. It was meant to help the countries grow their economies so that they didn’t have to resort to narcotics trade, and the agreement is largely responsible for the flourishing flower industry in Ecuador and Colombia. But if Ecuador and the U.S. don’t work out a replacement pact by its expiration date, a 7 percent import tax could undercut Ecuador’s status as the pre-eminent rose provider to the world.
Neighboring Colombia, the first country to capitalize on the cash crop about 30 years ago, has already signed the agreement. Its well-established floriculture industry, which is most fertile in the savannahs around Bogotá, is Ecuador’s main competitor. If tariffs make rose exporting more costly for Ecuador, the country could lose its buyers to Colombia and other free-trade countries, where prices won’t rise.
Talks between the U.S. and Ecuador failed early this year because indigenous people protested, arguing that free trade with a country that subsidizes its farmers would put their farms out of business. Botia, the farm’s engineer, understands that the workers and owners are often divided on free trade.
“In Colombia, too, there were protests so that we wouldn’t sign it, but in the end people realized it was a good thing,” he says, folding his hands together, his clipboard tucked under his arm. “Most people misunderstand the agreement. If they really get to understand it, they’ll realize it’s good.”
Unlike other agricultural products, roses stand to benefit from free trade, since the U.S. is not a serious competitor in flower growing. Ecuador has the greatest advantages in rose-growing in the world. Farmers say that Ecuador’s unique spot in the “mitad del mundo” – the middle of the earth – makes their roses grow straighter. The Andes mountains, which run in a strip down the middle of the country, provide the altitude that makes the bushes grow taller and produce larger blooms. The Ecuadorian rose is pre-eminent for an already superlative flower, but its preference may be tested if it becomes more expensive for consumers.
A free-trade agreement also offers the promise of improving labor standards, either through the signing countries' standards or by increasing consumers' awareness of workers' plight.
“We absolutely think that (an agreement) could be a mechanism for promoting more protection for labor rights,” says Nora Ferm, who works with the Quito-based Fairness in Flowers campaign for the International Labor Rights Fund. “We’re always saying that free trade agreements should be used to pressure countries and companies to respect the labor rights of their workers, but so far we haven’t seen that.”
The agreements that the U.S. signed with Colombia and Peru, for example, encourage the countries to follow international labor standards, but the agreements bare no threat to halt trade if violations occur.
Consumers have yet to demand higher labor standards as well. Years ago, before technology improved and international standards were raised, pesticide residue on roses was so strong that consumers could smell the chemicals, not the flower, Botia says. Since the toxins are not as offensive today, Americans are safe and blissfully unaware of the danger they pose to workers.
Markets have affected farming practices before by paying more for clear-conscience products such as fair-trade coffee, but buyers have yet to scrutinize where their roses come from, even as Americans wield enormous power over the lives of third-world workers.
“They don’t know what conditions are like in the flower plantations,” says Ferm. “They have this idealistic picture of workers in these nice rose gardens.” Canada’s biggest flower distributor, Sierra Flower Trading, has introduced a label that guarantees participating farms provide benefits and safety to workers and take care of the environment. In the U.S., a company called Organic Bouquet began the movement toward socially and environmentally conscious flowers in 2001. In the years since then, Scientifically Certified Systems has introduced a similar green label to Canada’s called VeriFlora. But these laboring efforts have a long way to go before they account for the majority of flowers sold in the U.S.
On the Fiesta Flowers farm, Juan Jose Noboa, the 33-year-old owner, is the one who worries about international politics and its effect on his workers. He must make business decisions based on these unpredictable forces, knowing that the lives of 40 people depend on him. And until the government or consumers demand more accountability on farms, the duty of protecting workers falls to him.
Noboa recently sat behind the desk in his office, a simple affair with a cow-skin rug and a view of the tall, brown grasses of the Ecuadorian highlands. On one wall is a detailed dry-erase-board map of his hacienda, color-coded by crop. Noboa is a thoughtful man who speaks English. He wears a flannel jacket and a Mickey Mouse baseball cap and calls his employees hija or hijo, terms of endearment meaning daughter and son. They call him el doctor.
On this morning, he lit a Marlboro, and held it near his face, explaining his philosophy of farming.
Noboa’s family has owned this 400-hectare farm, or about 1,000 acres, for hundreds of years. He is descended from Spanish colonists and a former Ecuadorian president, who still has a street named for him in La Esperanza. The farm is mostly used for dairy cows, but roses are his most profitable venture. He's also growing an experimental crop for the University of Arizona.
Now married with his own two small children, he spent his young years in New Orleans and Mexico City, moving with his father’s career as a surgeon. When he reached college age, he left for Chile to study veterinary medicine for eight years. When he returned to Ecuador, he met Cristina, now his wife, for the first time. Their grandmothers had been best friends, but they’d both left Ecuador to study abroad and had never met. His wife thinks like him; she has created a business that allows the farm’s workers to buy essentials like food and toilet paper at discounted prices and on credit.
Noboa took over the farm in 1998, when the then-partners had run it into the red. Things have improved.
His mind is fixed on preserving his forefathers’ legacy and supporting the people who rely on him for their livelihoods. He knows his farm and the 9-hectare expansion he's planning depend on the prospect of a trade agreement between Ecuador and the U.S. Expanding the farm is expected to create 70 new jobs for the people of La Esperanza.
“We are all connected in some way,” Noboa said. “At the end there is a relation, and we are all part of one thing. But maybe that’s too traditional.” The cigarette goes out. He lights it again.
“I prefer to go a little bit slower but with my conscience clean.”