Roses are greenIF YOU come home to a vase full of roses on Valentine’s Day in Europe there will be a good chance they were picked a few days earlier on the shores of Lake Naivasha in Kenya. The fertile Rift Valley soil, warm days and cool nights make for perfect flower-growing conditions.
The Netherlands still dominates the global horticulture industry, but Kenya is digging itself a growing niche. Its cut-flower exports increased 12-fold to 137,000 tonnes between 1988 and 2014 as buyers realised it was cheaper, and counter-intuitively greener, to fly blooms thousands of miles than to heat Dutch greenhouses. More than 30% of the European Union’s cut-flower imports now come from Kenya. Most are roses.
After being cut from inside the pale, plastic greenhouses crouched by the lakeside, the thorny stems are stripped of excess leaves and packaged to customers’ specifications. The bunches are then shepherded into 5°C cold rooms by workers in quilted boiler suits before being driven to Nairobi airport, landing at Amsterdam’s auction or with in-country agents around 48 hours after being plucked.
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Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1T08wfl
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