2023-08-31 14:54:55
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Published on 08/31/2023 16:54
Video length: 8 mins.
Raw. Article written by Brut.
France Televisions
With his eighth novel Nuit Rose, the novelist Oscar Coop-Phane is interested in the trade of cut roses, from the terraces of Paris with the dealers to their place of production where they are harvested in Ethiopia.
To understand this whole system, Oscar Coop-Phane traveled to Ethiopia where he met pickers who cut roses throughout the day in conditions “degrading and degraded”. In this very gendered system, men spray harmful products with unsuitable equipment that cause serious health problems. “What greenhouse owners offer them to protect themselves from pesticides is to drink half a liter of milk a day. It’s terrible because, indeed, humanly, it’s really sordid. And on the other side, in terms of ecology, it’s also terrifying. Because these greenhouses, which never belong to the Ethiopians, pump all the water that is there and therefore all the farmers around find themselves on the straw, it is the case to say it, they can no longer cultivate anything. And then well, followingwards, it leaves by cargo plane. So here once more during Valentine’s Day, there are seven to eight cargo planes a day leaving Addis Ababa with boxes of roses which are flattened, refrigerated and which arrive in Aalsmeer, in the Netherlands, therefore in that famous flower market I was talking regarding.”
What to do ?
If this rose industry is as polluting as it is degrading for these workers, the author explains that there are no real solutions. “The pickers I met there, for example, they were delighted with this work and might survive thanks to it, when others don’t have a job at all. So, that’s the whole question, but it’s the question of capitalism in general so, what do we do? Because if we support, if we buy, let’s say, it can support people who need it and at the same time, we feed this machine which is monstrous.”
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