Competition is transforming the buying and selling of flowers

May 10th 2007 | NAALDWIJK

A BUNCH of flowers can appear beguilingly simple, but it is a miracle of distribution. Its delicate blooms may have grown on farms scattered around the world, yet they arrived at your local florist within days of harvest. Along the way, crowded with millions of others, your stems may have been part of the endless parade under the fluorescent lights of the Dutch flower auctions.
AFP Now that’s a bunch of flowers

Run by co-operatives of local growers, the auctions embody logistical virtuosity. Each lot of flowers—30% of them grown abroad—is unpacked, placed in buckets of water, wheeled under an electronic clock before a gallery of bidders, and then packed up again and shipped to its new owners, all before 9am each day. Over 17m stems are sold each day beneath the 39 descending-bid clocks at FloraHolland and Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, the two biggest flower auctions. Jacques Teelen, boss of FloraHolland, boasts that within 36 hours a flower can reach any florist in Europe.

Read it on the Economist’s site…

How African cocoa-growers are moving upstream into chocolate

April 4th 2007

FUN though it is to pretend that a magic bunny provided the chocolate in your Easter basket, it is much more likely to have been grown by smallholders in West Africa, the region that produces 70% of the world’s cocoa. The crop is an important source of income for many countries—the largest producer, Côte d’Ivoire, earns over 20% of its export revenues from cocoa. But although global sales of chocolate amount to some $75 billion a year, growers capture only a tiny fraction of this: around $4 billion a year from the sale of cocoa beans.

Read it on The Economist’s site…