According to the National Retail Federation, "37.8 percent of Americans will buy flowers for Valentine’s Day 2015, spending a total of $2.1 billion." Of course, flowers are bought all year long, for various reasons, such as birthdays, anniversaries, mother's day, wedding, graduation, promotion, or "just because". The most popular type of flower to buy is the rose, which means that roses are the most prevalent flower available in all sorts of colors at floral stores, in grocery stores, street vendors, as well as other places that sell flowers. From a consumer perspective, all this is to the good, as the choice and convenience for buying flowers is huge, with, flowers also being sold online through sites such as proflowers.com, 1-800-flowers.com, and FTD. Besides the sheer convenience of all the places that you can shop at to buy flowers, there is also the fact that roses, overall, are incredibly inexpensive from a purchaser standpoint. For instance, on any normal non-holiday, without even considering specials or coupons, you can easily find a dozen roses for prices like $15 or $12.99 or even $10, with some stores or street vendors possibly even lower. This is a fantastic price for something that is so well received and appreciated by the recipient, it makes you really admire the competitiveness of the stores within America, our efficient transportation system, as well as the brilliance of the flower growers, themselves. However, there is one fundamental problem with all of this, and that is the assumption that the roses that are bought and sold in America, are in fact grown and produced in America, but in actuality a lot of the roses consumed in America, are from outside of America, from countries such as Columbia (the dominant player) and Ecuador.
The fact of the matter is, roses distributed and sold in the United States, use to be 99% domestic, but in recent years, this percentage has plummeted to well under 5%, which effectively means that rose production within America has been ceded to the countries that make up the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA) which provides these countries "duty free" access to America. This means that because there is a tax/duty exemption set aside for these foreign countries, that they are now competing against American companies, with the foreign countries having the advantage of significantly lower labor costs as well as significantly lower land costs, and their only really big expense coming from the shipping of their foreign flowers which is done by cargo plane on a massive scale. Once these flowers safely arrive in America they are then sold to American wholesalers that specialize in these business deals that clearly undercut and annihilate domestic manufacturers of roses, with the wholesalers, in turn, selling these roses to domestic stores and other vendors throughout America.
Obviously, because the price of roses is so reasonably priced, the consumer is a big winner, and those receiving the gifts are also truly appreciative. Perhaps too, it's wonderful that this trade act was enacted which allows monies to be properly allocated to those that can produce and distribute the product at a lower price point. Maybe that is the way that it should be, but understand this, that labor and land are often considerably cheaper in other countries than in America, so that today we have roses imported in massive waves to Americans, perhaps tomorrow it will be agricultural products that we take for granted such as corn and soybeans; and what will we do when we no longer can produce the same, and the distributors of such, decide how it is best to allocate these valuable food items worldwide.