Cut-Flower Production in Colombia—A Major Development Success Story for Women?

Starting in the 1970s, the production of cut flowers for export has spread in Colombia's central high land, the Sabana de Bogotá. Creating some 75 000 jobs by the mid-1990s, the Colombian flower industry has been described by the World Bank as one of the major development success stories of the last two decades. In the first part of the paper the author examines possible reasons for this success, considering Colombia's position on the global market as well as economic restructuring, demographic, and social changes in Colombia which explain not only why flower production fits well into government restructuring plans, but also the availability of cheap labour—one of the key factors in international competition. As 60% to 80% of the workers in the cut-flower industry are female, the main focus is on the rising number of women seeking employment. In the second part of the paper the author attempts to show how the benefits and costs of employment by the flower industry are perceived by the different local actors. Drawing on monographs written by local researchers, focus-group interviews with workers, and expert interviews, she discusses different themes, for example, employment practices, working conditions at the farms, and housing conditions in the worker's communities, changing gender relations, and women's emancipation and their new dependency on the firm. The flower industry is shown to draw on economic and social changes in wider Colombian society and to reinforce some of these changes. The women workers, although gaining income and status and finding industrial-type working relations, pay with a double work load and by living in difficult social and environmental conditions entailing constant health and unemployment risks.