Valentine's Day: Rising British demand for flowers leads to a trade-off between the Kenyan economy and the environment.
Clasping a bouquet of roses, Paul Nyaga smiled shyly.
"Yes," he said, "there is someone I want to give flowers to on Valentine's Day, but the flowers won't be from here -- I'll get them from the field."
All around him, hundreds of workers in green overcoats were sorting blooms, assembling bouquets and wrapping them into plastic packaging complete with British supermarket logos and price tags, in the giant packing hall of Oserian flower farm in central Kenya.
Nyaga, 26, a slim young man in a brown shirt and blue baseball cap, was checking the labels on a boxful of roses destined for a Sainsbury's supermarket shelf. "Same Price. Same Quality. Now Fairtrade," the label promised.
"I don't know what Fairtrade means," Nyaga confessed. "I know that it's one of our products ... but I can't recall the meaning."
Britons spend over ?1.5 billion (US$2.6 billion) a year on cut flowers, and Kenya has nearly a quarter of the market, which peaks today as millions of Britons give flowers to loved ones on Valentine's Day. As many as 50,000 people now work in Kenya's flower industry, and for the past few weeks they have been working flat out to meet orders.
The industry, now the country's second-largest exporter, is driving the expansion of Kenya's economy and is fuelling a population boom around the shores of Lake Naivasha.
But the British love of roses and saying it with blooms has led to a tense trade-off between economic progress, environmental destruction and social problems.
At the Oserian farm, where 5,000 workers labor in a sprawl of greenhouses from where daily shipments head straight to Tesco's, Sainsbury, Marks & Spencer and other British outlets, the Fairtrade brand is seen as a way to polish the industry's tarnished image and balance the competing interests of business and Lake Naivasha's ecosystem.
For years, human rights groups lambasted Kenya's mainly foreign-owned flower companies over low pay, chemical hazards and the plight of casual workers.
Conditions have mostly improved since then and the ethical imperative has also prompted the company to seek ways to reduce its environmental impact, employing hydroponic farming to cut back on water use and getting three-quarters of its energy from a geothermal spring.
"Since Fairtrade has come in, the company is more careful with employees," said Isaac Mwagi, chairman of the self-help group which manages the workers' Fairtrade money in Oserian. "Before, there was just two months maternity leave, but now it is 100 days."
Not all is rosy in Oserian's garden, however. Last week workers rioted after being sacked en masse for striking in a dispute over wages and working conditions. Police reportedly fired teargas and fought running battles with strikers.
Fairtrade roses went on sale only two years ago, and most workers do not recognize the name. But it has a direct impact on their lives: 8 percent of the export price comes back to Oserian to be invested in community projects. That translates as about ?2,000 a month from British sales, while a similar brand in Switzerland, named Max Havelaar, netted the workers a premium of ?124,000 last year.
"Some people don't understand the concept," Mwagi admitted. "They want cash, and you have to explain that they need to identify a project -- because the concept says the project should benefit the majority and not an individual."
Though jobs in the flower farms are keenly sought after, environmentalists fear the impact of extracting water from the lake as well as the risks of pollution from pesticides.
"It's going to be a challenge to maintain the environment of the lake," said Sean Finlayson, roses manager at Oserian.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
RSS