Blood on the Roses: Ecuador's Cut-Flower Miracle and the Hidden Cost of the Perfect Bloom
In the high Andes north of Quito, Ecuador has built one of the most lucrative agricultural export industries in the world. Its roses — long-stemmed, intensely coloured, chemically immaculate — fill the petrol-station forecourts and supermarket aisles of Europe and North America. But behind the Valentine's Day bouquets and Mother's Day arrangements lies a story of pesticide poisoning, water scarcity, Indigenous labour exploitation, and a small-farm economy struggling to survive the very industry it helped create.
The Valley of Flowers
The road into the Cayambe region climbs steeply from Quito, winding past eucalyptus groves and crumbling adobe walls until it crests a ridge and reveals one of the most startling agricultural landscapes in the Americas. Stretching across the high valley floor and spilling up the volcanic slopes in every direction are thousands of white plastic greenhouses, their translucent roofs catching the Andean light like fields of snow. Below them, the town of Cayambe hums with a particular kind of controlled frenzy. Trucks loaded with cardboard boxes marked FRAGILE — PERISHABLE reverse into loading bays. Cold-chain refrigeration units rumble. Workers in rubber boots and ponchos move with the urgent precision of people who understand that their product has a biological deadline.
This is Ecuador's floriculture heartland. The country now ranks as the world's third-largest exporter of cut flowers, trailing only the Netherlands and Colombia, and the Cayambe region accounts for roughly three-quarters of all rose production. More than two billion stems leave Ecuador every year, destined for the United States, the European Union, Russia — via Kazakhstan, which serves as a transit hub circumventing sanctions imposed after Russia's invasion of Ukraine — and dozens of other markets. Roses alone represent 66 percent of the country's total flower output, generating export revenues that surpass coffee, bananas, shrimp, and most other agricultural commodities Ecuador produces.
It is, by almost any conventional measure, an economic miracle. And like most economic miracles in the developing world, it rests on foundations that official statistics do not capture.
High Altitude, Higher Stakes
Patricia Catucuamba and her husband Milton Navas have farmed this land for more than two decades. They are Kayambi Indigenous people, part of a community whose presence in this valley predates the Spanish colonial period by centuries, and who today find themselves at the centre of one of the most globalised commodity chains on earth.
Their ranch sits at 3,300 metres above sea level — an altitude where the air is thin enough to make newcomers dizzy and where the ultraviolet radiation is so intense that exposed skin burns within the hour. It is also, as generations of agronomists have discovered, an altitude that produces roses of extraordinary quality. The intense sunlight drives photosynthesis at a furious rate. The cool nights slow cell respiration, allowing sugars and pigments to concentrate in the petals. The result is a bloom that is larger, more deeply coloured, and longer-lasting than roses grown at lower elevations. A stem cut in Cayambe can last three weeks in a vase; a stem grown in a Dutch greenhouse might last ten days.
For twenty years, Catucuamba and Navas operated primarily as dairy farmers, a livelihood that is increasingly precarious. Maintaining a viable milk operation requires substantial grazing land — land that has become expensive and fragmented as the flower industry has expanded, buying up plots, drilling wells, and constructing the infrastructure of industrial floriculture. The economics of small-scale dairying in the Andes are unforgiving: margins are thin, disease risk is constant, and the large co-operatives that process milk hold substantial pricing power over smallholders.
Five years ago, Catucuamba and Navas made a decision that thousands of small farming families across Cayambe have made before them: they built a greenhouse and planted roses.
Their operation is modest by the standards of the valley's industrial producers — a 4,500-square-metre greenhouse sheltering five rose varieties — but its construction required significant capital investment. They borrowed money, negotiated with suppliers of planting stock, and learned a new vocabulary of growing schedules, nutrient ratios, and export-grade quality standards. Today, the invoices on their kitchen table show impressive gross revenues. The costs circled in red, for pesticides and agrochemicals, are also impressive.
"Diversification isn't just a strategy," Catucuamba says, moving through the rows of roses in the greenhouse, her hand trailing along the leaves. "It's survival here. If the milk price drops, if the cows get sick, if there's a drought — you need something else. The roses give us that. But they demand everything in return."
The Architecture of a Global Industry
To understand how Ecuador came to dominate the premium rose market, it is necessary to trace the deliberate construction of a comparative advantage spanning four decades.
The floriculture industry in Ecuador began in earnest in the 1980s, when a combination of factors aligned to make the Andes north of Quito uniquely attractive to flower producers. The region possessed the agronomic advantages — altitude, soil, sunlight — already described. It also possessed something equally valuable to investors: a large Indigenous and mestizo rural population accustomed to agricultural labour, with wages far below anything competitive in the Netherlands or the United States, and a regulatory environment in which labour and environmental standards were, at best, aspirational.
Early producers, many of them Colombian or Dutch entrepreneurs, established large plantations and quickly established export relationships with importers in Miami — the primary entry point for cut flowers into the United States. The model proved extraordinarily profitable. By the 1990s, Ecuadorian roses were appearing in American florists and European wholesale markets, prized for their exceptional stem length — often sixty to eighty centimetres — and the size and perfection of their blooms.
The national association of flower producers and exporters, Expoflores, lobbied successfully for favourable export conditions and helped develop the infrastructure — cold-chain logistics, air cargo relationships, phytosanitary certification systems — that enabled Ecuadorian flowers to reach consumers in forty-eight hours from the moment of cutting. International trade agreements, including the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act in the United States, provided tariff advantages that further entrenched Ecuador's position.
Today, large plantation operators in Cayambe run sophisticated, capital-intensive businesses. The largest farms employ hundreds of workers, operate their own cold rooms, packing facilities, and quality-control laboratories, and maintain direct commercial relationships with major supermarket chains and wholesale distributors in Europe and North America. Some have invested in drone-based crop monitoring, precision irrigation systems, and proprietary rose varieties developed specifically for their target markets.
What has not changed is the fundamental labour model. Ecuador's minimum wage stands at approximately $482 per month — roughly £350 at current exchange rates — and most flower workers earn at or close to that floor. The workers who spray pesticides, who harvest in the early-morning hours, who pack stems into cardboard boxes through long shifts in refrigerated rooms, are among the lowest-paid agricultural workers in Latin America.
The Chemical Question
Inside one of Cayambe's largest plantations — a facility employing approximately five hundred workers, protected at its perimeter by armed guards — the air changes the moment you step beyond the ornamental entrance. It carries a faint chemical sharpness, something between cleaning fluid and lawn treatment, that settles at the back of the throat. Workers move through the rows of roses without respirators. The ventilation in the packing halls consists of open doors. No one in the management team, when asked directly, can provide a comprehensive list of the pesticides currently in use.
"Any agricultural activity leaves an environmental footprint," says the manager, an agricultural engineer in a pressed shirt who conducts tours of the facility with the ease of long practice. He points out the propagation room, the quality-control station, the cold room where stems are held at two degrees Celsius before loading. He explains that the company rotates its pesticide-spraying teams every three months — a practice intended, he says, to limit cumulative exposure. He notes with apparent pride that certain chemicals are off-limits at this facility, citing carcinogenicity and harm to pollinators.
He does not mention what is apparent outside the facility's production area: toxic waste containers discarded informally near the perimeter fence. He does not mention that Ecuador's environmental monitoring capacity is, by the assessments of multiple independent researchers, chronically underfunded. He does not mention that the regulatory framework governing pesticide use in cut-flower production operates, in practice, in a grey zone that does not apply the limits used for food crops — because these flowers are not eaten.
That distinction — that ornamental flowers are not consumed — has long been used to justify pesticide application regimes in floriculture that would be illegal for food crops in both the producing and consuming countries. It is a distinction that the Austrian environmental organisation Global 2000 sought to interrogate in a study that tested sixteen bouquets of roses purchased in European markets.
The results were arresting. Across the sixteen bouquets, researchers found traces of seventy-nine distinct pesticides. Of these, forty-nine were classified as capable of disrupting endocrine systems, carcinogenic, damaging to reproductive function, or designated by the World Health Organization as acutely hazardous to human health. The average bouquet contained residues of fourteen different pesticides. One contained thirty-two. Three-quarters of the bouquets tested positive for chemicals that have been banned in the European Union specifically because of their toxicity — chemicals that are nonetheless legal to use in Ecuador and legal to import into European markets on flowers, because flowers are not food.
These residues pose a limited direct risk to the European or American consumer who buys the roses and puts them in a vase. The far greater burden falls on the people who grow them.
A Body of Evidence
Dr. Jose Suarez is an epidemiologist and environmental health researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who has spent nearly two decades studying the health consequences of pesticide exposure in Ecuador's flower-growing regions. His research programme, launched in 2008, has followed more than five hundred adolescents living in and around Cayambe, tracking their development against measures of pesticide exposure drawn from urine samples, blood markers, and detailed occupational histories of their families.
The picture that has emerged from this work is troubling in its specificity.
Children living near flower plantations, Suarez's research shows, exhibit significantly elevated markers of systemic inflammation compared to children from agricultural areas without intensive pesticide use. This chronic inflammatory state is not merely an abstract biological finding. It correlates, in Suarez's data, with measurable reductions in neurobehavioural performance — the battery of tests that assess how children think, reason, remember, learn, and interact socially.
"The connection is dose-dependent," Suarez explains in a conversation from his San Diego office. "Higher pesticide exposure corresponds to worse neurocognitive outcomes. And the exposure is not constant — it spikes dramatically around peak harvest periods."
The most revealing natural experiment in his data involves the calendar. Ecuador's flower industry operates on a production schedule organised around the Northern Hemisphere's gift-giving occasions: Valentine's Day in February, Mother's Day in May, Christmas in December. These holidays generate massive export surges that require enormous increases in chemical application to ensure the volume of flawless blooms the market demands. Suarez's team sampled children before and after the Mother's Day harvest — the largest peak in the calendar — and found pesticide metabolites in urine samples at sharply elevated levels in the weeks immediately following the harvest, with corresponding declines in neurocognitive test scores.
"After the Mother's Day harvest, we found that children had way higher pesticide exposure and lower neurocognitive performance than those examined later in the season," he says. "When exposure levels declined, abilities improved. That's a reversible effect — which is hopeful — but the children who grow up in these communities experience that cycle year after year."
More recently, Suarez's team has investigated the relationship between pesticide exposure and mental health. Their findings, published in a series of peer-reviewed papers, identify a statistically significant association between exposure to organophosphate pesticides — a class of compounds that function by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase, critical to nerve-impulse transmission — and elevated depression scores in their study population. The effect is measurable in both sexes but is more pronounced in women and girls, a finding Suarez attributes to a combination of biological vulnerability and the higher occupational exposure rates of women in Cayambe's flower workforce.
"We have found higher depression scores among participants who have higher exposures to pesticides," he says. "And we found that more strongly in women than in men."
Beyond depression, Suarez's programme has documented what he describes as a broader pattern of chronic disease burden in the flower-growing communities: higher rates of leukaemia than in comparable Ecuadorian populations, elevated rates of miscarriage and fertility complications, neurological symptoms including persistent fatigue and memory difficulties, and a range of chronic conditions consistent with long-term, low-level organophosphate and carbamate exposure.
A separate study, published in 2024 and focused specifically on floriculture workers, found that sixty-one percent of those examined showed symptoms consistent with pneumonitis — an inflammation of the lung tissue — attributed by the researchers to pesticide exposure and the inhalation of other agrochemical compounds used in flower cultivation. Skin conditions including contact dermatitis, rashes, and eczema are reported at high rates throughout the workforce, the result of direct skin contact with both the chemical inputs and the plant material itself. Some studies in the literature report pesticide poisoning rates of up to sixty percent among flower workers.
"The risks of the heavy use of agrochemicals extend beyond workers, affecting entire rural communities," Suarez says. "The people who work in the greenhouses, their children, their neighbours — they are all part of the exposure zone. And that zone is rarely discussed when people in Amsterdam or Los Angeles buy a bunch of roses."
A parallel concern raised by multiple researchers involves the fate of chemical inputs that do not end up in human bodies: the containers, the spray residue, the runoff from irrigation water that has carried pesticide compounds through the soil and into waterways. The Granobles River, which winds through the heart of Cayambe's flower-producing zone and whose banks are lined with greenhouse structures, has been the subject of contamination concerns for over a decade. Environmental monitoring in the region remains inconsistent, and comprehensive water-quality data is difficult to obtain — a situation that several researchers describe as convenient for the industry.
Women at the Centre
The floriculture industry in Cayambe, like most intensive agricultural sectors in the developing world, rests disproportionately on the labour of women. Indigenous women in particular — Kayambi women like Patricia Catucuamba — are the backbone of the workforce at every stage of the production cycle, from the planting and feeding of young rose plants through to the harvest, grading, and packing of export-quality stems.
This is not accidental. Women in the region have historically been considered easier to manage, less likely to organise collectively, and more willing to accept precarious employment conditions. The floriculture sector's recruitment practices have reinforced these dynamics, and the structure of the work — piece-rate harvesting, shift-based schedules, a culture of unpaid overtime enforced through the threat of fines for absences — has created an employment model that extracts maximum productivity while minimising the costs of compliance with labour standards.
At the large plantation visited for this article, workers receive the national minimum wage of $482 monthly. Several workers, approached discreetly and speaking on condition of anonymity, described a working environment in which missing a shift results in a financial penalty deducted from their pay. Overtime, they said, is expected but frequently uncompensated. The rotation of pesticide-spraying teams every three months — presented by management as a health protection measure — also has the effect of limiting any individual worker's ability to document cumulative chemical exposure, or to connect their health symptoms to a specific chemical regime.
Working conditions in the actual pesticide-application areas of the plantation could not be independently verified. Management declined to permit access to those areas.
For women like Catucuamba, who occupies the unusual position of being both a smallholder rose producer and, like many in her community, a participant in the broader flower economy, the industry presents a particular kind of double bind. It offers economic opportunity — real income, engagement with global markets, the satisfaction of producing something of international value. It also subjects her and her neighbours to chemical exposures that independent researchers link to serious long-term health consequences, while providing her and her fellow small producers with a market position that is structurally precarious.
"I know the chemicals are dangerous," Catucuamba says, standing among her own roses — which she manages with considerably more care, and fewer inputs, than the large plantations. "But what is the alternative? The land is there. The market is there. My family needs to eat. These are not choices you make from a position of strength."
The Certification Mirage
The existence of fair trade and sustainability certification schemes in the cut-flower industry might seem to suggest that the problems documented by researchers like Suarez are being addressed through market mechanisms. In theory, labels like Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, and various national certification schemes are intended to verify that certified farms meet minimum standards for worker safety, fair compensation, environmental management, and pesticide use.
In practice, the picture is considerably murkier.
Only approximately 0.1 percent of roses exported from Ecuador carry the Fairtrade label — a vanishingly small share of a market that produces more than two billion stems annually. The reasons for this are multiple. Certification is expensive and administratively burdensome, particularly for small producers who lack the organisational infrastructure to manage documentation requirements. Large plantation operators, who might more easily absorb certification costs, often find that the commercial premium for certified flowers does not justify the operational constraints that certification imposes. Retailers in the US and EU, meanwhile, have been slow to develop the consumer demand that would drive premium pricing for certified flowers at the scale needed to change industry practice.
Enforcement is an additional problem. In a sector characterised by rapid production cycles, complex supply chains, and the physical inaccessibility of many growing areas, third-party auditing is resource-intensive and not always reliable. Workers report being coached before auditor visits on what to say and what not to say about their conditions. Environmental standards that exist on paper are not always reflected in the water-quality data — when it can be obtained — that flows downstream from the greenhouse zones.
New legislative initiatives aimed at improving conditions in Ecuador's agricultural sector have faced determined opposition from industry lobbyists and from a government that has consistently prioritised export revenues and foreign investment over regulatory enforcement in the agricultural sector. The Ecuadorian government did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
The Political Economy of Roses
Ecuador's flower industry does not exist in a political vacuum. The country has experienced significant social and political turbulence in recent years, with a dramatic escalation in organised crime and violence that has made Ecuador one of the highest-homicide-rate countries in Latin America. President Daniel Noboa — son of the country's wealthiest man and the inheritor of one of its largest agribusiness fortunes — has positioned himself as a strongman capable of restoring order, deploying military forces against criminal organisations and, critics charge, against legitimate social protest.
In October 2025, the government's decision to eliminate the longstanding diesel fuel subsidy — a measure that overnight raised fuel prices by more than fifty percent — triggered a nationwide strike and a wave of roadblocks concentrated particularly in the north of the country, including the Cayambe region. The flower industry, with its just-in-time logistics and cold-chain dependencies, is acutely vulnerable to transportation disruptions. The protests partially paralysed the economy for several days before the government deployed military and police forces. Several civilians were reported killed or injured in the response.
For Catucuamba and Navas, the fuel crisis and the political violence are not abstractions — the roadblocks cut through their community, disrupting their access to markets and supplies — but they are also not their primary preoccupation. The problems that organise their daily life are more immediate and more intimate than national politics.
Water
When you ask Milton Navas what he worries about most, he does not mention pesticides, or wages, or the price of roses on the Dutch wholesale auction. He goes to the kitchen tap, turns it on, and holds his hand under the thin stream.
"Count how long before it goes warm," he says. "That's the groundwater. When it's cold, there's water in the mountain. When it's warm, we're pulling from the bottom."
Access to water is the existential issue for small farmers in Cayambe. The valley's hydrology has been dramatically altered by the expansion of industrial floriculture. Rose production is water-intensive: each stem requires between ten and thirteen litres of water during its growing cycle, and large plantations use sophisticated drip irrigation systems that draw continuously from the region's canals, rivers, and underground aquifers. The Granobles River, the valley's main surface water source, has been the subject of multiple water-rights disputes between large plantation operators and smallholder farming communities.
The regulatory framework governing water allocation in Ecuador grants priority to existing users, meaning that large plantations that established irrigation rights early in the industry's development have senior claims over the water that smaller and later entrants — including traditional farming communities — depend on. Navas describes a system in which his water supply is cut off for three twelve-hour periods each week, even during critical growing periods for his roses, while the large plantations downstream continue to draw from the same shrinking canals.
"Water defines everything," he says. "How long the crops will last, how many animals survive, how entire communities endure on the slopes below. When the big farms take more, we take less. And when the rains don't come — which is more often now than it was — everyone suffers, but we suffer first."
Climate change is compounding the problem. The glaciers on the slopes of Cayambe volcano — one of the few places on earth where a glacier crosses the equator — have retreated significantly over the past three decades. These glaciers have historically functioned as natural water towers, releasing meltwater steadily through the year and buffering the region against seasonal drought. Their retreat means less reliable water in the dry season and a long-term reduction in the total water budget available to the valley.
The large plantations, with capital and political connections to invest in deeper wells, alternative water sources, and more efficient irrigation technology, are better positioned to adapt. Small farmers like Catucuamba and Navas are not.
The Imperfect Rose
At the end of a long afternoon in the greenhouse — checking stems for damage, measuring bloom size against the export-grade colour cards tacked to the wall, filling out the paperwork that accompanies every batch destined for the packing house — Catucuamba brings a bunch of roses into the kitchen and puts them in a jug on the table.
They are not perfect. One bloom has a petal with a faint brown edge. Another has a slight asymmetry where the sepals failed to open evenly. There is no pesticide residue on them, because Catucuamba has chosen to manage her small operation with far fewer chemical inputs than the industrial standard — a decision that costs her on the export market, where only flawless flowers command the prices that justify the investment, but that she describes as a matter of principle and of health.
"The ones I send to export, those are different," she says. "Those are perfect, because the market demands perfect. These ones — these are ours."
Outside, the Andean rain has returned. A rainbow arcs over the greenhouses, and the brass-band rhythms from a nearby harvest celebration echo across the valley. In the distance, refrigerated trucks are already moving toward the highway, carrying the perfect roses toward the airport at Quito, toward the cold rooms of Miami and Amsterdam, toward the petrol-station forecourts and the supermarket shelves and the hands of people who will never know the name of the woman who grew them, or the water she fought for, or the chemicals she chose not to use.
The industry will continue. The roses will continue. The question that researchers and advocates are increasingly pressing — whether the extraordinary human and environmental costs of Ecuador's floriculture miracle will eventually be reflected in the price of a Valentine's Day bouquet — remains unanswered.
Dr. Suarez, who has spent nearly twenty years documenting those costs in the urine of children, the lungs of workers, and the neurological test scores of adolescents in Cayambe, is not optimistic about the speed of change.
"The people who bear the burden of this industry are not the people who control it," he says. "They are not the people who buy the roses. They are not the people who set the pesticide regulations in Ecuador or the import standards in Europe. They are farmworkers and subsistence farmers and children who live near greenhouses. And their suffering is structurally invisible."
He pauses. "But it is there. It is in the data. And at some point, the gap between what we know and what we do about it becomes a moral question that the whole supply chain has to answer."
KEY FACTS
Ecuador is the world's third-largest cut-flower exporter, behind the Netherlands and Colombia. More than 2 billion rose stems are exported annually. Roses represent 66% of Ecuador's total flower output. Three-quarters of Ecuador's rose production is centred in the Cayambe region. Only 0.1% of exported Ecuadorian roses carry Fairtrade certification. A 2024 study found 61% of floriculture workers showed symptoms consistent with pesticide-linked pneumonitis. Research on 500+ adolescents found pesticide exposure associated with reduced neurocognitive performance and elevated depression scores. Ecuador's minimum wage is approximately $482 per month. The average bouquet tested by Global 2000 contained residues of 14 different pesticides; 75% carried chemicals banned in the EU.
