Excerpt from article: 

Last November, Lydia Lopez, a flower worker from Colombia, visited Duluth to talk about the cut-flower industry. Her visit elicited many questions: Is it time we give serious attention to where cut flowers come from? Who pays the real price for their availability? Should we add flowers to the human-rights conscious consumer list of Fair Trade coffee, chocolate, bananas and T-shirts?

Nobody can answer these questions better than Lopez. She has worked on flower farms for 24 years and was recently elected president of her local union. She traveled more than 3,000 miles from Bogota, Colombia, to Duluth and elsewhere in the Upper Midwest to tell students and community groups about the impact of globalization and free-trade agreements on the cut flower industry in Colombia.

On KUWS-FM in November, she offered a compelling testimony about the violation of labor rights, the lack of environmental protection and the deterioration of her country’s local economy...