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In the flower business, the week of Mother's Day perennially marksthe annual pinnacle of sales. Even with all those hopeful Casanovasdropping beaucoup bucks for bouquets on Valentine's Day, we still shell out more formom. But the holiday isn't all sunshine and roses. Behind the scenes,there's an economic and geopolitical battle going on over importedflowers. With about two-thirds of consumers buying them for Mother's Day,U.S. spending on cut flowers for this holiday alone will be $2.2billion. But it's less of an economic shot in the arm than it couldbe, because nearly 80% of all flowers sold in the U.S. come fromSouth America. And part of the reason for that is a policy inWashington that supports some foreign flower-growers with U.S. taxdollars. A Brief History of Blooms Historically, the flower market has often been a tumultuousbusiness: Consider the Tulip Mania that took place during the17th-century Dutch Golden Age. That infamous and odd period, widelyconsidered the first economic bubble, saw prices for tulip bulbssoar to completely insane levels before the entire bulb marketcrashed spectacularly. At the peak, the price for a single bulb wasmore than 10 times the annual income of a typical skilledcraftsman, and even topped the value of a deluxe house inAmsterdam. Tulip Mania has been compared to the dot-com bubble and thesubprime mortgage crisis. In 2010's sequel to the 1987 classic Wall Street , Gordon Gekko compares the the way bulb buyers behaved those longcenturies ago to the way the market behaved in the lead-up to theGreat Recession -- with similarly painful results. But the current brouhaha in the sector stems from Washington givingeconomic support for South American flower growers at the expenseof domestic growers -- a hot-button issue, especially at a timewhen "buy American" is being stressed as a way to boost theflagging U.S. economy. A Long Way to Grow Odds are, the blossoms in your Mother's Day bouquet were grown inColombia or Ecuador. "That's right -- grown, flown, then trucked to various destinationsin the U.S.," said Kasey Cronquist, CEO for the California CutFlower Commission. "But given the option, over half of allconsumers have said they'd rather purchase domestically grownstems." Those well-intentioned patriotic urges are sidetracked in part bythe fact that about 85% of consumers don't know where their flowerscome from, according to a 2007 Fleishman Hillard survey. During2011, U.S. Customs and Border Protection processed approximately5.1 billion cut flower stems. The CBP's flowery workload gets extraheavy in the run up to Mother's Day, when customers clamor forimported pink and lavender rose varieties that get marked up anextra 25% or more in light of the high demand. In response, a "buy local" flower movement has sprung up, but itssupporters will have their work cut out for them. Why Our Flowers Are Foreign Forty years ago, America grew and sold its own roses. Then theenergy crisis of the 1970s hit. Prices for the natural gas used toheat greenhouses soared, and it become more cost-effective to growthe flowers of love in warmer climes. Today, explains Patrick Dahlson, CEO of Mayesh Wholesale Florists,the U.S. supply of flowers can't come close to meeting our vastdemand. "There's simply not enough," he said. "If you want to talk aboutroses, there's next to nothing domestically. They make up 30% to35% of cut flower sales here, but U.S.-grown roses would accountfor under 1% of roses sold here. If you're going to say 'We onlybuy California,' then you're saying we don't have roses any more.". We are high quality suppliers, our products such as China Chinese Language Lessons Online , Daily Life Mandarin Lesson Online for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Daily Life Mandarin Lesson Online.
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