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Despite Valentine’s Day being just around the corner, it seems that fresh flowers are completely out of fashion.
Saudi Arabia’s Religious police have banned the sale of all red items, roses especially, as of last Sunday up until after February 14th. Apparently because the celebration of Valentine’s Day promotes sin and encourages relationships out of wedlock.
Meanwhile, environmentalists are complaining about the chemicals that are used in the commercial flower growing industry, as well as the carbon footprint of flowers that are usually flown in from overseas countries such as Kenya, at this time of year.
The news from Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, sounds like a joke, and makes no sense at all to my mind. While the green lobby would seem at first glance to have a point, although it actually turns out that Kenyan flowers aren’t especially environmentally unfriendly.
In spite of clocking up more than 4,000 air miles in the process of being imported to the UK, the total carbon emissions from flowers from Kenya, including air freight, are only 17 percent of those for comparable flowers originating in the Netherlands, according to research carried out by the natural resources department at Cranfield University.
The report, which studied a Kenyan farm that supplies a large UK supermarket with its roses, analysed energy consumption and CO2 emissions for growing, packing, cooling and transporting the roses to the UK, as well as factoring in fertilisers, pesticides, vehicles and materials used.
These figures were then compared with data from a grower in the Netherlands, where artificial heating and lighting was used to grow the roses, instead of sunshine.
The results were that 6,000 kg of CO2 was released per batch of Kenyan roses, compared to 35,000 kg for production of Dutch roses.
Yields of roses grown in Kenya were also about twice those grown in the Netherlands; most likely due to the excellent weather, all year round sunshine, and some help from the development of boxes that can be packed efficiently into aircraft, as well as un-powered gravity-fed irrigation systems.
More importantly however, the fresh flower, fruit and vegetables industry makes up 65% of all exports from Kenya to the European Union, according to figures from the Fresh Produce Exporters Association (FPEA) of Kenya.
This year however, flowers will need to bring in even more money for Kenya, since civil unrest has kept all the tourists away. So, if you want to help the developing nations, Kenya especially, then you should buy as many red roses as you can afford this Valentines Day.
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Posted by Jonathan in Miscellaneous