Corona Daily 252: Flowers of Hope

The Kenya flower council founded in 1996 has a mission of making Kenya the home of the world’s best flower growers. Tambuzi Limited, one of its 130 producers, grows eight million flowers a year on 22 hectares. Located 180 km north of Nairobi, on the rainy foothills of Mount Kenya, Tambuzi exports to sixty countries, including the UK, Holland, Russia, Australia, USA and China.

Twenty years ago, it started with just twenty amateur people growing roses outdoors. Now it employs over 500 people, and supports 5000. It grows 80 flower varieties, including roses, gypsophila and ammi, and bouquet fillers like rosemary, mint and lavender. Its biggest known specialty, though, is the David Austin scented rose. Austin was a British breeder of exquisite roses. Tambuzi chooses roses from breeders and runs trials on the farm. The specialists look for a scent they love, the number of petals, the flowers’ tolerance to pests and disease, the colour and the yield.

After eight weeks, workers bend the chosen rose stems so shoots can sprout. At twenty weeks, they are harvested by hand, by 67 workers, all women. The women cut the stems and put them into a solution of nutrients, where they continue to grow. The stems then go into a 4 C cold storage, are sorted into bunches and after packing sent in a refrigerated lorry to the Nairobi airport.

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Tambuzi is a Fairtrade flower organization. Like an author’s royalty, a Certified Fairtrade farm must pay 10% of the sales price to the workers. Kenya, Ethiopia, Ecuador and Tanzania account for 98% of the certified Fairtrade production. Kenya is at the top. The European buyers call the roses from Kenya large, multi-petalled and voluptuous, their fragrance extraordinary.

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Around Valentine’s day, 2020, the Tambuzi farm managers heard something was wrong. They had learnt about the virus from China, and talks about various flight cancellations. In March, as the orders collapsed, and the air traffic shut, Tambuzi first cleared ten hectares of gypsophila flowers and planted food crops instead. The farm had 500 employees and no money to pay their salaries. With tears in their eyes, they dumped thousands of roses in the pit.

The flower workers with a great sense of urgency planted beans, maize, potatoes, kale, onion and tomatoes in the cleared plots. By June, the vegetables were ready to harvest. They were distributed among the employees. The great team-building exercise which brought the farm owners, directors and workers together helped everyone survive.

Tambuzi is already thinking of diversification. It has faced floods and droughts in the past. To counter that, it harvests rainwater, uses solar panels and some production has been moved indoors. But coronavirus crushing the demand and halting the supply lines was an unmatched event. Now Tambuzi is thinking about building resilience, and other lines of income such as livestock breeding.

To see the Tambuzi farm with your own eyes, I recommend the 23-minute BBC clip that shows the flower farm’s usual operations, and their actions during the pandemic.

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Not all roses were thrown away. The Kenyan rose farms and Kenya Airways on 28 April sent 300 bouquets to the UK as a gesture of support and empathy. UK had already lost 20,000 people to coronavirus. The campaign was called “flowers of hope”. In the UK, the aromatic bouquets were distributed to doctors and nurses.

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It’s not just about flowers or roses. The pandemic has highlighted several global supply chains we were not aware of. Can Europe live without flowers coming from Africa? The world is interlinked by Americans wearing Bangladeshi jeans, and European weddings decorated with Kenyan roses.

It shows how profoundly bogus the “Make America great again” or “Brexit” or other “My country first” campaigns are. It is in the interest of the human race to acknowledge our interdependence and make trade freer by removing borders.

Ravi