Dutch

A way to look at the world flower industry is to look at the total production value. Though production values for China and India are very substantial, these countries has negligible share in the world flower exports. As per the 2004 statistics United States of America led in the production values with almost Euro 5.5 Billion while Netherlands and Japan followed with Euro 3.5 Billion and Euro 3.2 Billion respectively.

The above given figure shows the intensity in the Netherlands and Japan. Several other European countries and USA are the second group. The production value per ha for Columbia is also relatively high. Low production value for Kenya and South American countries can be partly explained due the low production costs in these countries rather than the value of these flowers in the consumer markets. However production of alone is not enough to be part of global commodity chains.

The share of Netherlands in world trade is around 50% while share of Columbia around 10% and Ecuador around 5%. Kenya is world’s fourth largest exporter while other African countries like Uganda, Zambia, Ethiopia, Morocco and Tanzania have significant exports to the EU. China, India and South American Countries have insignificant exports to the EU. USA mainly imports from Columbia, Ecuador and the Netherlands. USA, Canada and the South American countries can be considered as the second flower cluster. But European cluster which is the first cluster is twice big as the US one. It is significant that the Netherlands is both a large exporter and an importer. The import value is almost 25% of the export value. The Netherlands is the major supplier of the European cluster while Japan is part of the Asia-Pacific flower cluster which is a quarter of the size of the US cluster. The main suppliers for Japan are the Netherlands, South Korea, New Zealand,