Roses from Kenya: Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers

Honorable Mention for the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) Book prize

The potential of floriculture grows at Lake Naivasha

Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry--which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women--is lucrative but enduringly controversial. More than half the flowers are grown near the shores of Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake northwest of Nairobi recognized as a Ramsar site, a wetland of international importance. Critics decry the environmental side effects of floriculture, and human rights activists demand better wages and living conditions for workers.

In this rich portrait of Kenyan floriculture, Megan Styles presents the point of view of local workers and investigates how the industry shapes Kenyan livelihoods, landscapes, and politics. She investigates the experiences and perspectives of low-wage farmworkers and the more elite actors whose lives revolve around floriculture, including farm managers and owners, Kenyan officials, and the human rights and environmental activists advocating for reform. By exploring these perspectives together, Styles reveals the complex and contradictory ways that rose farming shapes contemporary Kenya. She also shows how the rose industry connects Kenya to the world, and how Kenyan actors perceive these connections. As a key space of encounter, Lake Naivasha is a synergistic center where many actors seek to solve broader Kenyan social and environmental problems using the global flows of people, information, and money generated by floriculture.

Megan A. Styles is assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Illinois Springfield.