Those Valentine’s Day blooms might have come from Kenya

Associated Press

NYAHURURU, Kenya

This Valentine’s Day, there’s a good chance your flowers came from Kenya.

“I know the flowers are for giving on Valentine’s Day,” said Phanice Cherop, a worker at a flower farm in Kenya. “They are very beautiful.”

On a crisp February morning, Cherop squeezed through a row of shoulder-high white roses, cut a flower and methodically placed it in the bunch she carried. The Kenyan-grown flower likely was headed for a vase in Australia, England, Japan or the United States.

Kenya’s cool climate and high altitude make it perfect for growing large, long-lasting roses. Such conditions have helped make Kenya become the world’s fourth-biggest supplier after the Netherlands, Ecuador and Colombia.

Cherop, a 29-year-old single mother of two, works at AAA Growers’ Simba farm in Nyahururu, four hours’ drive north of the capital, Nairobi. It’s one of the company’s four 50-acre farms that make them Kenya’s third-largest grower of vegetables and flowers combined. Cherop was one of 600 workers bused in from surrounding villages to pick or pack thousands of roses to be sent around the world ahead of Feb. 14.

Flowers are intricately tied to the global economy. When it collapsed in 2008, the cut-flower trade lost $1.5 billion the following year. In 2013, global exports of cut flowers, cut foliage, living plants and flower bulbs amounted to $20.6 billion, more than twice the amount in 2001.

International events, including Russia’s war in Ukraine and plummeting oil prices, have shaped flower fortunes for numerous Kenyan farms. Sales to oil-producing nations, such as Norway and those in the Middle East, have dropped due to their reduced spending power, said Britain-born Andrew Mules, general manager of AAA Growers’ Simba farm.

“Up until two years ago, flowers would have been the most-profitable part of the farm,” he said. “Now it is our third after soft fruit and then vegetable crops.”

Kenya is the sixth-largest flower exporter to the U.S., according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. As east Africa’s agricultural powerhouse, Kenya supplies the European Union with 38 percent of its cut-flower imports, partly due to a tax-exemption trade agreement.

Mr. Mules, who farmed in Zimbabwe before being evicted under President Robert Mugabe’s land reforms, said prolonged rains due to the El Nino weather pattern have pressured the company’s bottom line.

“The timing of Valentine’s Day is perfect for Kenya because it falls in the dry season,” he said. “Unfortunately, this year, due to el Nino, it has lengthened the so called ‘short rains.’ Instead of stopping in November, we were getting rain in January.”