Volcanic ash not hurting flower exports

New Delhi: Even a thick cloud of volcanic ash can have a distinct silver lining. For India’s floriculturists, the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull—and the subsequent shutting down of northern Europe’s airspace—has pinched only a little, coming as it does towards the end of the six-month season of flower exports.
So as is always the case around this time of the year, Manjunath Reddy is only in first or second gear. His Bangalore-based company, Pushpam Florabase, has recovered from the Easter rush and is preparing for one last spike of activity for Mother’s Day, at the beginning of May, before exports cease entirely until October. “On an average, around about now, we’d be making maybe two or three small shipments a week,” Reddy says. “Luckily for us, exports are at their slowest ebb now.”
Indian flower exports have been declining for the last few years, since a peak of Rs649 crore in 2006-07. The Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (Apeda) had initially set a target of Rs1,000 crore for flower exports in 2010, but as exports continued to slip that figure had to be revised recently to Rs375 crore.
Reddy says that he is, at the moment, worried, but he doesn’t see any reason to descend into panic. After he preserved his flowers for a couple of days, he read in the newspapers that flights to Europe would continue to be grounded, so he sold them locally. “In India, there’s a domestic market that can absorb our flowers, and maybe this gives us a chance to rest our plants a little also,” he says. But he also ships $25,000 (Rs11.2 lakh) worth of roses from Ethiopia to London every week, and that sector “has completely shut down. There’s no local market there, so we’re looking at some losses”.
19/04/10 Samanth Subramanian/Live Mint

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Categories: Cargo Apr 2010, Foreign Apr 2010