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7/3/11

Flower Industry: Free-trade discord takes toll on flower importers - by Mimi Whitefield

Since Valentine’s Day, Miami flower importers have watched their expenses climb, contending with rising fuel prices and surcharges and, most vexing of all, the expiration of an Andean trade program that allowed them to bring in flowers from Colombia and Ecuador without paying duties.

Now U.S. flower importers must pay duties ranging from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on the billions of roses, carnations and other blooms imported from Andean countries — the source of about 90 percent of the flowers shipped through Miami International Airport.

So it should come as no surprise that those in South Florida’s flower importing industry, which handles around 89 percent of the cut flowers that arrive in the United States, were closely following this week’s maneuvering on the long stalled U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement and an effort to attach renewal of the Andean Trade Preferences-Drug Eradication Act to it.

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