Colombian Roses Power Valentine Exports and a Quiet Women’s Workforce

Before a Valentine bouquet lands in a vase abroad, it begins in cold, humid rows where Colombian women cut roses one by one in the dark. Their labor feeds families and fuels a signature export, even as February pressure tests bodies, logistics, and pride.

Before Sunrise, the First Cut Sets the Whole Chain in Motion

At six in the morning, with the sun still absent, Yolanda Camacho moves among the rose bushes with scissors in her hands. The air is cold. The climate is damp. The crop holds a hush, the notes say, because the workers are only beginning to arrive and take their places. It is an hour when sound carries, and when a small, clean snip can feel louder than it should.

Camacho has done this for twenty years. She selects roses one by one, reads when they are ready, and cuts the stems with a precise motion that does not damage the flowers. The work looks simple from far away. Up close, it is trained judgment repeated hundreds of times, the same movement with slightly different decisions.

This is the first step in a process that keeps going after harvest, when flowers are packed to preserve a cold chain between two and three degrees. That temperature, held over distance, is what keeps shape and aroma intact before the roses reach markets and flower shops in a hundred countries.

The trouble is that when people talk about Valentine’s Day, they often talk about romance as if it arrives already perfect, already tied with a ribbon. Here, romance begins as labor, and labor begins before dawn.

A few weeks before Valentine’s Day last year, Colombia exported more than 65,000 tons of flowers. The notes describe it as the equivalent of more than 900 million stems leaving greenhouses and crossing borders. Most went to the United States, which received 80 percent, followed by Canada with 4 percent, the United Kingdom with 3 percent, the Netherlands with 2 percent, and Japan with 2 percent, among others.

Those numbers can feel abstract until you return to the roses in the dark. Someone handles each stem. Each bouquet is built from decisions made on a damp morning.

Camacho describes what the job has meant in her life without exaggeration. “De este trabajo he podido sacar lo necesario para tener mis cosas, mi casa, para ayudar a mi familia,” she told EFE. She says she feels a quiet joy knowing something made with her hands reaches so many people and is received with affection.

Quiet joy is not a marketing slogan. It is the kind of feeling that sits beside fatigue and still matters.

A Women’s Industry That Carries Households on Its Back

Floriculture in Colombia generates more than 150,000 direct jobs, and the notes say about 60 percent of those jobs are held by women. Of those women, 55 percent are mothers. That detail changes the way you read the rows of roses. This is not simply a seasonal hustle. It is household economics, month after month, and for many families, it is the difference between stability and a precarious drop.

February intensifies everything. During the Valentine season, around 20,000 additional jobs are added to respond to the rise in international demand. More hands. More speed. More pressure. The same product, but now with a deadline that cannot be negotiated because calendars in other countries are fixed.

What this does is expose a reality many export industries share in Latin America. The global market treats the product as timeless, but the labor is brutally timed. Flowers do not wait. Flights do not wait. Buyers do not wait. The worker has to adjust.

Still, pride threads through the notes, and it is not naive. It is a pride that comes from providing. From building a home. From sending children to school. From not arriving home empty-handed.

In that sense, Colombia’s flower-export economy fits into a familiar Latin American story: women holding up the visible and invisible economies simultaneously. A wage becomes groceries. It becomes school fees. It becomes rent. It becomes the small repairs that keep a household from slipping.

A bouquet abroad is soft to the touch. The system behind it is not always soft.

Postharvest Speed and the Weight of Valentine’s Week

After the cut, flowers move from the fields into postharvest. The notes describe a space where the rhythm accelerates. Roses are received, classified, hydrated, and checked individually before they are organized and packed. It is another kind of precision. Not the precision of the cut, but the precision of sorting and bundling, of maintaining standards, of protecting petals that bruise easily.

Sonia Sarmiento has worked among flowers for 38 years. While selecting roses, cleaning outer petals, and grouping them into bouquets, she describes an attachment to the work that is also an acknowledgment of what it has provided.

“Es lo que me ha dado para que mis hijos estudien, para que hoy en día sean unos profesionales, para estar bien, un soporte de vida muy grande, porque es muy difícil llegar a casa sin qué proveer. Gracias a mis flores, nunca me ha pasado eso,” she told EFE.

She describes the workplace positively. She also admits that in February, the pressure multiplies, but says workers try to help each other. That sentence matters because it hints at the social infrastructure inside the warehouse, the informal networks of support that emerge when speed is required, and bodies are tired.

The policy dispute here is not a partisan fight in a legislature. It is the question of what kind of economy Colombia chooses to protect and how. Floriculture is one of the country’s most representative exports. It produces foreign currency. It creates formal employment. It depends on cold chain logistics and international access. And it rests heavily on women’s labor, particularly mothers.

Carolina Pantoja, the director of economy and logistics at Asocolflores, the Colombian Association of Flower Exporters, said Valentine’s season represents between 18 and 20 percent of the total annual export volume, she told EFE. She adds that the market is the country’s third-largest generator of foreign currency, after the mining and energy sectors, and green coffee, she told EFE.

Exports reached about $2.35 billion in 2024, the notes say. Between January and November 2025, they exceeded $2.2 billion, with 3 percent growth compared to the same period the year before, Pantoja said, she told EFE.

Numbers like that are often used to justify the sector on a national scale. But the lived reality is smaller and sharper. It is a woman choosing the right rose before sunrise. It is another woman wiping petals and building bouquets in a room where the pace rises. It is the cold chain held at two to three degrees, not as a technical detail but as the thin line between value and waste.

A memorable line that feels true here is also uncomfortable: the Valentine bouquet is a luxury item built on disciplined necessity.

And still, in the damp morning rows, the work continues because families need it. Because the country profits from it. Because, for the women doing it, a quiet pride can coexist with pressure, and sometimes it has to.

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