Floral industry

The floral industry is one of the higher industries in many developing and underdeveloped countries. Floriculture as an industry began in the late 19th century in the United Kingdom, where flowers were grown on a large scale on the vast estates. The present day floral industry is a dynamic, global, fast-growing industry, which has achieved significant growth rates during the past few decades. In the 1950s, the global flower trade was less than US$3 billion. By 1994, it had grown to US$100 billion. In recent years, the floral industry has grown six percent annually, while the global trade volume in 2003 was US$101.84 billion.

The floral industry essentially consists of three major components: the growers, the wholesalers and the retailers whose businesses are quite intermingled. The recent trends are more towards eliminating the intermediaries, the wholesalers between the growers and the retailers, so that the flowers are made available at considerably low prices.

Some flowers are sent packed flat in boxes. This enables large amounts of flowers to be packed in small spaces like aircraft holds. Other flowers cannot survive for long periods out of water such as orchids, gerberas (gerber daisies) and water lilies. These are either sent with their own sealed water container (called picks) on each stem end - for more expensive or tropical flowers - or are transported in buckets of water (This method of transport in water is often referred to as "Procona"). The latter method extends the life of flowers and reduces labor time as flowers are ready for sale, but obviously also reduces the amount of flowers that can be transported as they are much heavier than dry-packed flowers and hence air transportation charges are higher.

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Wikipedia