There are few things on which the UK’s green lobby and Saudi Arabia’s vice squad would probably agree. But here’s one: Valentines Day flowers are a bad thing.
The Saudi religious police hate bouquets – and red roses in particular – because they think they encourage people to have sex when they shouldn’t so they’ve banned them. Our eco warriors hate them just as much for rather different reasons: they disapprove of the chemicals used to grow commercial flowers and of the fact that most of the ones we pass around on February 14th are flown in from countries such as Kenya and are therefore thought be to particularly environmentally unfriendly.
The Saudis are wrong on so many levels I can’t even begin to comment on them but the greens are wrong in a very simple way. You see Kenyan flowers aren’t particularly environmentally unfriendly. Despite flying over 4,000 miles to reach us, the total carbon emissions from them, including air freight, are almost 6 times lower than for Dutch flowers, according to a study from Cranfield University in 2006.
Why? Because the growing conditions around the Rift Valley, are perfect for flowers so producing them requires very little in the way of electricity heavy irrigation heating.
More importantly, however, the flower industry was Kenya’s third largest foreign exchange earner, after tourism and agriculture, last year. This year it’s probably going to be its second largest earner and not for good reasons (all the tourists have been scared away), making it all the more important that we support it.
So if you want to help the world and in particular the Kenyans, who could really do with it right now, you should buy as many red roses as you can possibly afford from them.
First published in The Evening Standard 12/2/08