‘Nothing says love like chemicals’: Valentine’s roses often covered in pesticides, testing finds

Key Highlights

• We couldn’t, as flower farmers, legally use these toxic chemicals here in the UK.”Valentine’s Day is the flower industry’s busiest time of the year.
• According to analysts, about 200m roses are produced to meet the demand for lovers’ gifts on 14 February in Europe alone. More than half on sale in the UK have been sourced from the Netherlands.
• But for most stems, that is just the last leg of a much longer journey from farms in countries such as Colombia, Kenya and Ethiopia, where the climate allows for year-round production and laxer regulatory regimes allow for more powerful pesticides. To determine the levels of pesticide residues on flowers likely to be on sale this Valentine’s Day, Pesticide Action Network Netherlands (Pan-NL) randomly tested 17 bouquets – five bunches of roses, eight mixed bouquets, and four bunches of tulips. The highest concentration of pesticide residues was found on a bouquet of red roses bought from a Dutch garden centre, with 65.8 mg/kg.
• Of 26 pesticides detected on the sample, 13 were banned for use in the EU. None of the bouquets tested were pesticide-free, but the roses and mixed bouquets contained the most residues.
• Among those, the analysis found 87 different pesticides, including eight metabolites, roughly equally split between insecticides and fungicides. Of the 79 active substances found, almost a third were banned for use as “plant protection products” in the EU and the Netherlands, while 78% “pose[d] a significant risk to human health and/or the environment”, said Pan-NL.