MIAMI– While Valentine’s Day may not be known as a busy time for air travel, it is a busy time at Miami International Airport. where many of the country’s fresh cut flowers arrive from South America.
According to the US Customs and Border Patrol, about 90% of roses and fresh cut flowers sold in the United States for Valentine’s Day come through Miami. They arrive on hundreds of flights to Miami on their journey to florists and supermarkets in the US and Canada. That amounts to about 18,000 tons of flowers passing through Miami.
“This season we have transported around 460 million flowers from Ecuador and Colombia,” Diogo Elias, senior vice president of Avianca Cargo, said at a press conference in Miami on Monday.
Among the most exported flowers this season by the airline were roses and carnations from Bogota; pompoms, hydrangeas and chrysanthemums from Medellin; and roses, carnations and baby’s breath from Quito, Avianca said in a statement.
The Valentine’s Day season actually started in mid-January and ends on Wednesday. During that three-week period, flowers arrived in Miami on about 300 flights, Elias said.
And that’s where the agricultural specialists from U.S. Customs and Border Protection come into play. At the airport they check the bunches of flowers to prevent potentially harmful plant, pest and foreign animal diseases from entering the country.
Their job is to ensure that flower imports do not contain the kinds of exotic pests and foreign animal diseases that cause $120 billion in economic and environmental losses annually in the United States, said Danny Alonso, the airport’s port director.
It’s a huge undertaking.
Through Feb. 8, agricultural specialists had processed about 832 million stems of cut flowers, inspected 75,000 cut flower sample boxes and intercepted 1,100 plant pests, he said. Last year, specialists processed more than 861 million stems of flowers in the same period, resulting in 932 interceptions of plant pests
“It’s one of the most demanding times of the year for our staff here,” Alonso said.
And once the Valentine’s Day rush is over, everyone involved can take a breath before planning begins for the next big floral day in the United States: Mother’s Day in May.