IN APRIL 2024, the Consumer Goods Forum — a Paris-based coalition of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers — announced that Colombia’s Florverde Sustainable Flowers certification had achieved formal recognition under its Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative. The announcement was accompanied by the language common to such moments: “leadership”, “credibility”, “trust”. In Ethiopia, the national flower growers’ association was preparing its own application for the same recognition. In Kenya, the flower council was pursuing benchmarking under a parallel process. In the Netherlands, the world’s largest flower market was extending its MPS sustainability certification to more farms in more countries. Something, it seemed, was finally happening.
The question worth asking — the question this report attempts to answer — is what, precisely, is happening, and whether it is enough. The global cut-flower industry’s ethical reform effort is now well into its third decade. Fairtrade began certifying flowers in 2001. Colombia’s first voluntary social standards date to 1973. The Kenyan certification ecosystem now lists ten distinct social standards, each with its own auditing regime, logo, and code of conduct. The infrastructure of ethical floriculture has never been more elaborate. And yet, as the preceding reports in this series have documented, wages in the producing countries remain below living-wage levels, chemical exposure continues to harm workers, land displacement persists, and freshwater ecosystems remain under serious pressure. The gap between what the certification landscape promises and what it delivers is the central problem of ethical floriculture.
The Certification Landscape: What Exists
The first thing to understand is the sheer number of standards in play, and what that plurality means in practice. At least 20 distinct social and environmental standards are active in the global cut-flower industry. In Ethiopia alone, the standards in use include the EHPEA Code of Practice at three tiers, MPS-ABC, MPS-SQ, MPS-GAP, Fairtrade International, the Ethical Trading Initiative Base Code, Fair Flowers Fair Plants, and GlobalG.A.P. In Kenya, the Kenya Flower Council’s own Flowers and Ornamentals Sustainability Standard sits alongside Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, MPS, GlobalG.A.P., the Ethical Trading Initiative, SA8000, the Business Social Compliance Initiative Code of Conduct, the Flower Label Programme, and the Kenya Bureau of Standards’ national code. In Colombia, Florverde competes and coexists with Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade, GlobalG.A.P., and various buyer-specific codes.
This proliferation is not, primarily, a sign of rigour. It is a sign of fragmentation. Different buyers require different certifications, so farms accumulate multiple overlapping audits addressing roughly the same issues through slightly different methodologies. The compliance costs of running three or four audit processes per year are significant — particularly for smaller farms — while the marginal improvement in actual practice that each additional standard generates is minimal. The Floriculture Sustainability Initiative, a Dutch-based industry body, has attempted to rationalise this landscape by creating a “basket of standards” framework that accepts multiple recognised certifications as equivalent paths to sustainability. It is a sensible pragmatic response to the multiplication problem. It does not address the deeper question of whether any of the underlying standards are demanding enough.
Fairtrade: The Gold Standard and Its Limits
Fairtrade is, by common consent, the most credible ethical intervention available to flower consumers in wealthy countries. Its Hired Labour Standard addresses occupational health and safety, collective bargaining, and conditions of employment. Its Premium system — one of the highest of any Fairtrade product category — provides flower farms with an additional 10% for every stem sold under the Fairtrade mark, to be allocated by workers’ committees to community projects. In 2023, Fairtrade flower producers earned €7.3 million in Fairtrade Premium alone, with 5.7 billion certified stems produced. More than twice as many Fairtrade flower workers are in relatively higher wage brackets compared to workers on non-Fairtrade plantations. More than 11,000 women in Ethiopia have benefitted from Fairtrade’s Dignity for All programme.
These are real achievements, and they should not be diminished. Fairtrade-certified flower farms in Kenya provide things that non-certified farms routinely do not: formal labour contracts, functioning worker committees, some degree of protection from arbitrary dismissal, and community investments that have built schools, health clinics, and clean water infrastructure. Kenyan workers on certified farms receive, on average, an additional €107 annually in economic benefits through the Fairtrade Premium. This is not a trivial sum in an economy where monthly wages hover below €100.
The limits are equally real, and Fairtrade’s own research acknowledges them with more candour than most certification bodies manage. Flowers and plants are one of the few Fairtrade product categories without a Fairtrade Minimum Price — meaning that the price support mechanism that underpins Fairtrade’s effectiveness in coffee and cocoa is absent for flowers. The higher Premium is intended to compensate, but it does not prevent farms from cutting wages when market prices fall. More fundamentally, Fairtrade certified farms represent a minority of the global industry. The standards governing the rest — the majority — are weaker, less independently audited, or entirely absent. Choosing Fairtrade flowers makes a genuine difference to workers on certified farms; it does nothing for the much larger number of workers on uncertified ones.
Kenya: The Most Developed Reform Ecosystem
Kenya is the most instructive case study in what an earnest, multi-decade effort to reform floriculture looks like — its achievements, its failures, and its continuing vulnerabilities.
The Kenya Flower Council’s Code of Practice has been in place since the 1990s and has evolved substantially in that time. Annual audits for member farms cover good agricultural practices, environmental responsibility, and social compliance. The KFC’s Flowers and Ornamentals Sustainability Standard (known as FOSS, or KFC Silver) is now being submitted for benchmarking against the Consumer Goods Forum’s Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative, placing Kenya’s domestic certification alongside internationally recognised equivalents. The National Environment Management Authority has imposed water abstraction limits and environmental compliance requirements on farms around Lake Naivasha. An 89% improvement in water abstraction compliance has been recorded in the Naivasha basin over recent years.
Labour conditions have genuinely improved on certified farms. Kenya has two industry-specific labour organisations — the Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union and the Agricultural Employers Association — whose collective bargaining agreements set sector-wide wage floors. Average monthly wages on certified Kenyan flower farms have risen by nearly 30% over five years, driven partly by union activity. Safety standards are measurably higher than on comparable operations in Ethiopia or Ecuador. These are not incidental improvements. They reflect a decades-long process of institution building: unions, employer associations, a functioning collective bargaining framework, and a government with at least some capacity and will to enforce labour law.
The vulnerabilities are structural and have sharpened recently. The proliferation of casual and short-term contracts — a deliberate industry strategy to reduce permanent headcount and avoid the obligations that attend permanent employment — has left a growing proportion of the workforce outside the protections that certified employment provides. The Kenya Human Rights Commission documented in 2012 that women workers who become pregnant consistently fail to receive the legal protections they are entitled to; the pattern remains. A recent wave of farm closures and downsizing, driven partly by rising input costs and competition from Ethiopia, has exposed the absence of adequate social protection schemes for laid-off workers. As the KFC itself has acknowledged, the industry’s commitment to its workers ends, too often, at the farm gate.
Colombia: A Long March, Imperfect Progress
Colombia’s Florverde Sustainable Flowers certification, managed by Asocolflores, is the industry’s most ambitious home-grown ethical standard. It covers management, labour rights, education, health and safety, water and soil management, pesticide handling, waste, biodiversity, and energy efficiency, and is open to flower producers of any size. In April 2024, Florverde became one of the few floriculture standards to achieve recognition from the Consumer Goods Forum’s Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative — a rigorous benchmarking process that few certification schemes pass. The recognition reflects genuine institutional development: Florverde has built a more resilient Colombian supply chain, reduced environmental impacts on participating farms, and improved documented worker conditions.
Colombia has also made meaningful environmental progress. More than 60% of the water used in Colombian flower production now comes from harvested rainwater stored in on-site reservoirs. Pesticide use, which reached approximately 200 kilograms per hectare annually at its peak, has been reduced on certified farms, driven partly by the development of integrated pest management programmes and partly by export market pressure. The Sabana de Bogotá, once one of the most chemically saturated agricultural environments in Latin America, has improved measurably on certified land.
What has not improved adequately is wage levels and freedom of association. Despite decades of certification, Colombian flower workers’ wages remain insufficient to meet basic needs. The industry employs roughly 100,000 people in rural areas near Bogotá where alternative employment is scarce, and that dependency limits the effective bargaining power of workers even on certified farms. Of the hundreds of flower companies in Colombia, only three are unionised — a figure that reflects not a contented workforce but a history of union suppression that Florverde certification has not reversed. Labour monitors note that certification compliance varies substantially between Asocolflores member companies, and that non-member farms — a significant share of the sector — operate outside the framework entirely. The certification that has achieved international recognition does not reach the workers who most need it.
Ethiopia: The New Entrant’s Dilemma
Ethiopia entered the global flower market later than Kenya and Colombia, and its reform trajectory reflects both the advantages and disadvantages of that timing. The EHPEA Code of Practice, developed in 2007 in consultation with the ILO, Ethiopian trade unions, and government ministries, set requirements for good agricultural practices, environmental protection, worker welfare, and employment practices at three tiers: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. The Bronze level establishes basic legal compliance. Silver is benchmarked against GlobalG.A.P. and the Ethical Trading Initiative standard. Gold represents a level of performance competitive with the best international standards.
The ambition is genuine. EHPEA has built 36 wastewater treatment plants, treated nearly 60 million cubic metres of used water, and developed constructed wetland systems that have attracted international attention as models for the region. In late 2024, EHPEA submitted its Code of Practice for benchmarking by the Consumer Goods Forum’s Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative — a signal of intent to join the international certification mainstream. Its chief executive has stated publicly that SSCI recognition will “elevate the Ethiopian flower industry to new heights, ensuring our products are competitive in the global marketplace while upholding ethical practices.”
The gap between the Code and its implementation is, however, wide. Ethiopia has no legal minimum wage, which means that the Code’s employment practice requirements float against a floor that does not exist. Enforcement infrastructure is inadequate, monitoring capacity is limited, and the government has historically prioritised the industry’s expansion over compliance oversight. Smallholder farmers displaced by flower operations have no effective recourse. Workers at non-EHPEA member farms — a number that grows as the industry expands informally — are outside the Code entirely. The EHPEA itself has a structural conflict of interest: it exists to promote the interests of its members, and it is also the body that monitors their compliance with its own Code.
The most telling evidence of the Code’s limitations is not in the Code itself but in what persists despite it. Workers are still paid below the living wage. Conflicts over water access between flower farms and smallholder communities continue to be reported. The Aleltu River continues to dry in the Sululta district during the dry season. The Code has improved documentation and some practices on EHPEA member farms. It has not yet changed the terms on which the industry relates to the land, water, and communities it depends upon.
Ecuador: The Hardest Case
Ecuador is, across the board, the hardest case in the global flower reform story. It has a national certification — Flor Ecuador, established in 2005 — that verifies compliance with Ecuadorian legal standards and sustainable processes. It has Fairtrade-certified farms and a growing number of Rainforest Alliance-certified operations. Its industry association, Expoflores, participates in international standards development. Yet of the producing countries, Ecuador has the most documented sexual harassment, some of the highest rates of pesticide exposure, the lowest union density in the sector, and wages that most consistently fail to meet basic household needs.
The structural reasons for Ecuador’s persistent failure are instructive. The industry’s labour force is predominantly composed of women from rural communities with no alternative formal employment. Ecuador’s history of union suppression on flower farms — documented extensively and going back decades — means that the formal collective bargaining that has improved conditions in Kenya does not exist. Of hundreds of flower companies in operation, only three are unionised. Ecuadorian labour law provides protections that in theory equal or exceed those of Kenya, but enforcement is weak and workers who complain face retaliation that the certification system is not designed to prevent.
Flor Ecuador has real value as a baseline: farms that carry it meet Ecuadorian legal standards and have made at least formal commitments to worker safety and environmental management. But Ecuadorian legal standards are set by a government that has historically treated the flower industry as a priority export sector and calibrated its regulatory demands accordingly. A certification that verifies compliance with those standards is verifying compliance with a floor that has been set low. In a country where 61% of workers show symptoms consistent with pesticide-related lung damage, the floor has clearly not been set high enough.
The Dutch Factor
No account of ethical reform in the flower industry is complete without addressing the Netherlands, which accounts for roughly half of global flower trade by value through the FloraHolland auction complex at Aalsmeer. The Dutch flower sector’s MPS (Milieu Programma Sierteelt) certification, established in 1993, is one of the oldest sustainability schemes in the industry. MPS-ABC certifies environmental performance — pesticide use, energy consumption, water use, waste — on a points-based system. MPS-SQ (Socially Qualified) covers social performance. MPS applies to farms in the Netherlands and, through its international programme, to operations in producing countries.
The Netherlands exercises asymmetric leverage in the global flower trade: it sets the terms on which flowers enter the European market, and it increasingly uses that leverage to require sustainability credentials. The FSI Basket of Standards — administered from the Netherlands with Dutch industry at its core — has become the de facto gatekeeper for what “sustainable” means in the European flower market. By requiring that farms exporting to Europe carry at least one recognised certification, Dutch buyers have created a powerful market incentive for producing-country farms to engage with the standards system.
The limitation of this Dutch-mediated leverage is that it is expressed primarily as a price and access requirement, not as a commitment. Dutch auction houses buy what the market demands, at the price the market sets. When buyers demand certified flowers, farms get certified. When buyers primarily demand price, farms cut costs. The structural pressure that flows down the supply chain from Aalsmeer to the greenhouse floor is, in any given week, more likely to take the form of a margin squeeze than an ethical demand. The two are in tension, and market forces generally win.
The Regulatory Revolution and Its Retreat
The most significant development in ethical floriculture is not occurring on the farms themselves, or in the voluntary certification schemes that have governed the industry for the past three decades. It is occurring in the European Union’s legislature, and it represents a fundamental shift in the logic of the reform effort: from voluntary to mandatory.
The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which entered into force in July 2024, requires large EU companies — and large non-EU companies with significant EU turnover — to identify and address adverse human rights and environmental impacts throughout their supply chains. For the flower industry, this means that supermarket chains, importers, and major retailers selling certified and uncertified flowers in European markets will be legally obliged to conduct due diligence on the farms they source from, to act on what they find, and to face penalties of up to 5% of global turnover for failures to do so. The Directive was the most significant piece of supply chain accountability legislation in the world at the moment of its passage.
By December 2025, its scope had been substantially narrowed. The Omnibus I package, driven by EU competitiveness concerns and pressure from industry groups who argued that rigorous sustainability obligations would disadvantage European companies relative to American and Asian competitors, raised the threshold for CSDDD coverage to companies with 5,000 or more employees and €1.5 billion or more in turnover, and pushed full compliance back to July 2029. Mandatory transition plans were removed. The French diplomat’s description of the negotiations was apt: the EU had passed a law, and then walked it back under pressure from the same businesses the law was designed to regulate.
The retreat is dispiriting, but not fatal. The CSDDD’s reduced scope still covers the major European flower retailers and importers who dominate the market. A company with 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in turnover is a supermarket, not a boutique florist. Those companies will face binding due diligence obligations on their flower supply chains. The civil liability provisions — which allow workers harmed by supply chain failures to seek compensation in European courts — remain in the Directive, albeit subject to further revision. The principle of mandatory accountability, rather than voluntary certification, has been established and is not going away.
What Works, and What Doesn’t
After three decades of voluntary certification and several years of regulatory development, the evidence allows some conclusions.
Fairtrade works, within its scope. On certified farms, wages are higher, worker representation is stronger, chemical use is better managed, and community investment is real. The limitation is coverage: Fairtrade certified farms remain a minority of the global industry.
National industry codes — Florverde in Colombia, EHPEA in Ethiopia, the KFC Code in Kenya — work as market access tools and as frameworks for incremental improvement on member farms. They are inadequate as accountability mechanisms, because the organisations that set and monitor them also represent the interests of the farms being monitored. Self-regulation in industries with large numbers of vulnerable workers and weak state enforcement is not sufficient.
Union rights work better than any certification scheme. The single most consistent predictor of decent labour conditions in the flower industry is whether workers can organise freely and bargain collectively without facing dismissal or harassment. Kenya, which has functioning sector-specific unions and collective bargaining infrastructure, has better labour conditions than Ethiopia, Ecuador, or Colombia despite not having notably stronger environmental performance. Union rights cannot be audited into existence by a certification scheme. They require legal protection and enforcement.
Mandatory regulation has the potential to change the terms of the debate in ways that voluntary certification cannot, but its effectiveness will depend on whether it is actually implemented and enforced — which, given the Omnibus I retreat, remains uncertain.
A Patchwork World
The honest summary of the ethical floriculture landscape in 2026 is that it is a patchwork: meaningfully better on certified farms than a decade ago, still deeply inadequate in aggregate, geographically uneven in ways that correspond to which countries have been most exposed to consumer pressure, and structurally constrained by a supply chain that distributes costs toward the bottom and value toward the top.
The workers who grow the world’s flowers are aware of the certifications under which some of them work. They are aware of the logos on the packaging, and of what they are supposed to mean. They are also aware of the gap between what the logos say and what their pay packets, their health, and their relationship to the land on which they work actually reflect. That gap is the measure of how far the ethical floriculture project still has to travel — and of how much depends on it getting there.
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