Wilting dollar hurts Colombian flower growers on Valentine's Day

By Hugh Bronstein

CHIA, Colombia, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Colombian flower exporters face a loveless Valentine's Day, hurt by rising labor costs, income received in wilting U.S. dollars, and customers too worried about a recession to buy roses.

In the United States, which accounts for about 80 percent of Colombia's flowers exports, residents are battening down for an economic slump.

But Valentine's on Feb. 14 is the biggest day of the year for Colombian flower producers who employ almost 200,000 people, mostly women who might otherwise be caught in the violence and poverty caused by the country's four-decade-old guerrilla war.

Colombian plantations, which sell about $1 billion worth of flowers annually, have had to lay off 20,000 workers over the last several years. They are pinched between the weak U.S. dollar, which dilutes export revenue, and higher costs driven by inflation and oil prices.

"We now have the same revenue we had in 1999 and 2000, the last time the dollar was this weak, but our costs are 68 percent higher," said Felipe Arango, a flower industry consultant trying to help the MG farm in the Bogota suburb of Chia find ways to cut costs.

Two out of every three flowers sold in the United States come from this Andean country, but as the U.S. economy slows American buyers are in no mood to help out by paying more for roses and carnations, Colombia's two biggest sellers.

The weakening U.S. dollar, which has fallen about 14 percent against the Colombian peso over the last year, means that exports to the United States are worth less when the sales are translated back into pesos, the currency in which farms pay their rising bills.

Labor is the biggest cost for flower producers. Wages are linked to inflation which rose to 5.7 percent in Colombia last year as high oil prices pushed up transportation costs.