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

by Megan A. Styles, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Editor), K. Sivaramakrishnan (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295746500
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	12/10/2019
Series:	Culture, Place, and Nature
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Foreword K. Sivaramakrishnan vii

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xv

List of Abbreviations xvii

Introduction: Place, Power, and Possibility in a Kenyan Nerve Center 3

Chapter 1 Situating Naivasha: A Complex and Contested Place 25

Chapter 2 Low-Wage Laborers: Sacrifice in a Slippery Context 64

Chapter 3 Black Kenyan Professionals: Seeking Exposure 89

Chapter 4 Floriculture and the State: Building and Branding Kenya 115

Chapter 5 White Kenyans and Expatriates: Belonging and Control 146

Conclusion: A Changing Naivasha 178

Notes 191

Bibliography 201

Index 215

What People are Saying About This

Janet McIntosh

"Through Styles’ meticulous and well-historicized ethnography of Naivasha’s “nerve center,” we see many jostling aspirations: profiting, showcasing technological know-how, cultivating environmental consciousness, decolonizing the nation’s industries, even branding “Kenya” itself."

Sarah Osterhoudt

An engaging and very well-written work that gives impressive texture and context to the complicated world of the Kenyan flower industry.

Sarah Lyon

"An ethnographically rich exploration of the cut-flower industry on the shores of Lake Naivasha, clearly situated within a fascinating reading of Kenyan political and cultural history."

James Igoe

"Megan Styles invites readers to a place that is many places: Naivasha as a “nerve center” of globalizing floriculture. This convergent location is also a palimpsest of anti-colonial struggle, indigenous territory, conservation, commodity chains, development, neoliberalism, and white belonging. Styles’ polyvocal ethnographic writing shows how these historically contested and conflicting projects have become elements of an array of aspirational place-making projects. This book is an excellent contribution to an excellent series that should be widely read."

Editorial Reviews

"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."

The Journal of Modern African Studies

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

H-Net

"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."

Exertions

"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."

Illinois Times