Larry Saha Room - Haydon-Allen Building, Room 2175.  Presented by Jasmine Glover, PhD Candidate.

The global cut flower industry (CFI) is a classic example of the growth of an industry that has relied upon the cheaper labour and production costs of developing countries to produce high-input horticulture for export to developed nations such as UK and US.  These industries are strongly buyer-driven through mechanisms such as quality standards and codes of conduct and have been well theorised by sociologists and geographers using global value chain literature.  India, as an emerging economy, has encouraged the growth of the CFI as an export oriented crop, however, its evolution is somewhat different than that of the more established cut flower industries.  In this research, the CFI of India was explored through a detailed case study in the Nilgiris District of Tamil Nadu.  Findings suggest that the global value chain framework used to explain the established CFI in developing countries, such as Kenya and Columbia, does not fit when explaining the Indian CFI.  Instead, embeddedness and global production network literatures were found to offer a more appropriate framework.  This presentation explores the characteristics of the Indian cut flower industry; how the industry has grown and impacted on rural communities; and what makes India distinctive from other more established global cut flower industries.