Every weekend in a Lachine industrial park, a half dozen refrigerated trucks bursting with fresh cut blooms arrive at the gates of Sierra Flower Trading Ltd.

A sweet-smelling fact of globalisation, they’ve made the long haul from greenhouses in South America, California and Mexico to be repackaged and distributed to wholesalers in Montreal and throughout Eastern Canada .

The flowers -25 tonnes a week augmented by more varieties flown in from as far away as Australia and Thailand – wind up being sold in retail flower shops, supermarkets and corner stores.

And one of the busiest times for flowers is now – Christmas.

“Flowers aren’t a mom and pop business any more” said Colin Mclean, a Montrealer who founded Sierra with co-owner Tom Leckman in 1986

"We're actually on the cutting edge of a world-wide industry," added McLean, whose company was built up with the help of online sales through its Web site, www.sierraflower.com.

With $100 million in imports last year, Canada is a small but dynamic part of the $6-billion global cutflower trade. More than 15 million cut "stems" were exported to Canada last year, mostly from Colombia and Ecuador.

Think of that next time you buy a bouquet at a supermarket or your local florist's. Chances are, those hybrid ros-es, and carnations were harvested just a few days before at a farm next to the airport in Bogota, then whisked by plane to Miami and after that by 16-metre tractor-trailer to Montreal.

But foreign flowers are not necessar-ily an innocent pleasure. In the last few years, campaigns by environmental groups like the San Francisco-based Sierra Club have highlighted some of the problems in the developing world, where most of the flowers are grown.

Topping the list are illegal use of banned pesticides, poor working condi-tions for a mostly female - as well as child - peasant labour force, and deple-tion of water resources for irrigation.

"The cut-flower industry is another product of globalisation," said Angela Rickman, deputy director of the Sierra Club of Canada.

"At any time of the year, you can now easily get your hands on things that would normally be out of season," she said from the organisation’s Ottawa headquarters.

"It's too bad, because flowers are not a necessity. They're a luxury. And somebody else (down south) is really paying the cost."

Studies by Cactus, a Bogota-based coalition working to improve the lot of flower workers, have reported ill ef-fects of pesticide exposure on the labourers, including miscarriages by pregnant employees.

The industry disputes those and other claims.

One of the biggest exporters in the world is Colombia's dominant producer, the Americaflor subsidiary of Dole Food Co., a Los Angeles-based multina-tional. Dole got into the cut-flower business in 1998, buoyed by business-friendly U.S. legislation called the An-dean Trade Preferences Act, which since 1991 has eliminated tariffs on im-ported goods like cut flowers.

The law is one weapon in the US. ar-senal against illegal South American narcotics, helping steer agricultural workers off coca plantations and onto flower farms.

In August, Dole president for Latin America Rick Harrah told a U.S. Senate committee reviewing the act that the company is a "champion of environmental quality and worker welfare."

Americaflor, he said, is certified to "the highest possible environmental standard" - a rating of ISO 14001 from the International Organization for Standardization, a program run by in-dustry

The clean-hands argument is one Dole and other flower companies are making under increasing pressure from environmentally conscious im-porters, mostly in Europe. They've told the companies they need to spruce up their image, or lose out in foreign mar-kets. And the companies are listening. In Colombia, for example, the world's second-largest flower-exporter - after the Netherlands - producers have started labelling their flowers as "green" under a new program they run called Florverde. Other growers in Ecuador and elsewhere are also complying with environmental and labour standards set under the German Flower Label Program, in which independent inspectors award stamps of approval to good farms.

"Eco-labelling is a huge issue now in the international market for cut flowers," McLean said.

"It's a little bit like the fair-trade coffee movement," he added, referring to labelling that identifies coffee plantations that don’t exploit workers and enjoy some protection from commodity price drops.

“If you haven’t been certified to have safe and proper use of pesticides, or that your workers are properly paid and treated, then some of the more “green “ countries wont let you ship flowers to them”

Will Canadian importers be next? Mclean and his company hope so. They tell their wholesalers here to look for the Florverde and German FLP label on boxes of roses and other flowers they order.

“North America is behind the times on this issue, and that’s why our company is on the forefront of pushing Eco-certification for products in Canada” he said.

How long before local consumers can ask to the labels, and pay the premium that comes with them?

“Two years” Mclean predicted

“The trend will trickle down to consumers just like it has for coffee. Eventually you’ll be able to know when you are buying “fair flowers” and when you’re not”.