Robert Goodier is a communications coordinator for the Rainforest Alliance, based in our Guatemala City office. In February 2008, he traveled to Facatativá, Colombia to visit Elite, a flower farm that was recently awarded Rainforest Alliance certification. Here, he recounts the experience.

The highway out of Bogotá toward Facatativá, a town as small as the name is clunky, is lined with duplexes and housing developments. They are sandwiched between the highway and miles of fields and patchy forests. Where were the legion of people who lived in these, I wondered as we drove past. No one was sunning in the fields, there were no high-rise office buildings in sight, or even good hiding places.

Oscar Nausa, the farm auditor with Fundación Natura, our partner in Colombia, provided an answer. These are the new suburbs outside Bogotá, the middle-class solution to rising property rates in the city for those who don’t mind a commute. But that didn’t seem to account for all those homes. It turns out there are a lot of jobs available in the boonies, something we saw pulling up to the gate of Elite Flowers. Hundreds of men and women milled past in the morning cold, through the security gates and into the complexes of offices, warehouses, workshops and greenhouses in the immense group of flower farms.

Elite is one of the Rainforest Alliance’s newly certified flower farms in Latin America – others are in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Acres of roses and exotic astromelias in colors like the sun are tended and collected on the immense grounds of this group of 10 farms.

While Colombian newspaper headlines were fuming about the latest manifestations of the collapse in relations with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and tallying the crimes of the rebel groups, the flower farms were in full bloom and full-tilt production for Valentine’s Day. Nearly all the commercially grown flowers in Colombia are exported -- though Colombians celebrate el Dia de San Valentín or the Dia de Amistad -- only about five percent of the commercially grown flowers stay in the country.

The country exported its first flowers to the United States in 1968, and in the ensuing 40 years the cut flower industry has grown to nearly US$673 million, almost six percent of all of Colombia’s exports, including coffee and oil. Colombia is better known for its coffee, maybe even its emeralds, definitely its beaches and soap operas (Colombians are the geniuses behind Yo Soy Betty, la Fea, a sensation that emptied streets from Mexico to Peru the evenings it aired and has now been remade in the States as Ugly Betty.) but, according to the Colombian Flower Exporters Association, it is also the world’s biggest carnation exporter.

I asked Aracely Morales, a certification administration assistant at Fundación Interamericana de Investigación Tropical, our partner in Guatemala, for a breakdown of the problems typically plaguing flower farms and how they correct them to meet our standards. She listed three major areas of concern: waste disposal, chemical use and the treatment of workers. Elite, like most flower farms, roofs its greenhouses with plastic sheets, and when they wear out, they are replaced. Unlike other flower farms that toss aside the massive wads of plastic, Elite hires a recycling company to cart it off and turn it into something usable. Elite farms also generate massive mounds of plant waste, due in part to their exacting standards for exportation. Funny looking Siamese twin flowers, runts and other misfits are thrown out, not fit for lovers or the apologetic. Together with cuttings from the flower arrangements and other plant material they are heaped under a roof, turned by front loaders, mixed with biological catalysts and left to decompose into compost.

The second big problem on flower farms, Aracely identified, was chemical use. No certified farms are allowed to use the “dirty dozen” chemicals, defined by the Pesticide Action Network, and Elite takes an extra step developing organic repellents and fungicides. There is a garden cordoned off on each farm in Elite’s complex where plants such as chamomile, marigold and nettles are cultivated for their potent extracts and later sprayed on the flowers in place of commercial chemicals.

The third hurdle flower farms need to clear before obtaining certification is the treatment of their employees, Aracely informed me. Elite already had an exemplary education program in place for employee’s children – a private, high quality pre-kindergarten through fifth grade school available for free to children of permanent employees. To meet the standard, they improved their job and safety training programs for workers, established procedures for accidents and safe meeting areas and, notably, reduced the work day to six hours.

I saw clean, orderly grounds, immaculate upkeep in the offices and arrangement facilities and, something I think is important, people smiling while they worked among the flowers. I had intended to stay only a few hours in the morning, but the size of the farms and the long list of programs underway and people involved in training and helping other workers and caring for the environment, not to mention the home-cooked lunch served at the pre-school, kept me into the afternoon. Elite will export flowers with our seal on them in time for Mother’s Day in the States.