Let’s save the festival flowers. Coldiretti takes advantage of the stage of the 72nd edition of Sanremo to launch an appeal to the aid of Italian horticulture, brought to its knees by the flare-up of energy prices. In the first place of the expensive bill there are the costs of heating the greenhouses, but the increase in fuel prices for the handling of machinery and the increase in costs for fertilizers, pots and cartons also weigh on the made in Italy nurseries. . Urea, the raw material for fertilizers, increased by 143%, peat increased by 20%, plastic for pots by 72%, glass by 40% and paper by 31%.
If in other sectors of the agro-industry it is possible to concentrate cultivation operations in the hours of lower cost of electricity, it is not possible for horticultural companies to interrupt the activities, under penalty of death of the plants or failure to bloom.
Roses, for example, need a fixed temperature of at least 15 degrees to bloom and the same goes for gerberas, while orchids need at least 20-22 degrees to bloom and die in the absence of heating. Those who fail and cope with the increases have only one way in front of them, that of turning off the greenhouses and trying to reconvert production.
In Italy the horticultural sector, of which the Ligurian Riviera represents one of the national poles, is worth over 2.57 billion euros, generated by 27 thousand companies, with an overall turnover of 200 thousand employees. The disappearance of Italian flowers from the markets, writes Coldiretti, risks favoring imports from foreign countries which in 2021 have already registered a 20% increase in value: “Often these are products obtained from exploitation, as in the case of roses from Kenya for underpaid work without rights, or in that of flowers from Colombia and Ecuador, where women are penalized ».