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.

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"In addition to an exploration of controversial labor practices, the book is also about a lake and the confluence of wildlife, commerce, power and politics surrounding it. . . . Styles' book helps contextualize the labor that goes into a gift many will receive."

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"Styles has produced an insightful work filled with evocative analysis."

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"Styles’ vivid ethnographic descrip-tions draw attention to the myriad local contestations refashioned and created byfloriculture. This approach enables the reader to not only learn about the problem-atic sides offlower production in Kenya but to also get to know Naivasha as a site of possibility that has an important place in political and moral imaginations."

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"Styles succeeds in conveying the complexities and contradictions of global commodity production: work in floriculture, in spite of the possibilities it affords, is no bed of roses."