Dozens of women clad in bright red overcoats furiously attend to their slated tasks: most are packaging the Europe-bound roses, several are removing the dud flowers and twowomen stand bravely before a whirling blade that strips thorns and leaves.
As they go about their daily work that intensifies just before Valentine’s Day, large signs hang on every wall of the high-ceilinged factory reading: “A rosy future.”
The future, according to a handful of Kenya’s flower farms, is fair trade and the women working at Panda flowers in the lush Naivasha area west of Nairobi say they are reaping the benefits of the new trend.
Kenya’s flower industry is notorious for worker exploitation, but as consumers in the West become more aware of the provenance of their beloved roses, Kenyan companies are taking the fair trade route to boost their sales.
“There is a culture of exploitation in this country,” said Charles Wanguhu, a member of the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights who specializes in social and economic rights.
“In Europe, everyone wants to know where their products are coming from. The flower industry had to respond by ensuring better conditions, better wages and health and safety standards for their workers,” Wanguhu said.
Kenya has about 200 flower farms that employ some 50,000 people who work especially hard around Valentine’s Day. The flower industry is the East African country’s third largest foreign exchange earner, with most of the stems shipped to Europe.
But the industry has been chided by rights groups for overworking and underpaying their staff and practising environmentally unsound farming.
A greater awareness of those practices amongst consumers in Europe however is beginning to change the way Kenyan workers are treated.
“We were responding to a market demand,” said Richard Hechle, general manager of Panda Flowers, one of Kenya’s 12 internationally certified fair trade flower farms. “Customers want to know that their flowers are coming from a safe place and we provide that.”
Hechle said the switch to fair trade made sense financially. With fair trade certification, the 45-hectare farm competes with only 11 other certified plantations rather than with the entire industry, he said.
Some of the 900 employees at Panda, which sells most of its roses to a German company, said fair trade has had remarkable effects on their working conditions.
“Fair trade has really improved the lives of workers and the community,” said Esther Kinuthia, a junior supervisor standing between beds of yellow roses in one of Panda’s greenhouses.
In a country where more than half the population lives on less than one dollar a day and which has a soaring unemployment rate, exploiting workers is easy.
Before Panda became certified, most of its employees were casual labourers. Now, some 95 per cent of staff are permanent employees. Their minimum salaries were upped from about 50 dollars to 76 dollars a month - just about as much as Kenyan minimum wage.
“There is a big difference between myself as an employee of a fair trade farm and those who work at non-certified farms,” said Rosemary Achieng, a flower harvester, adding that strict audits conducted by independent fair trade certifiers keep management in check.
Achieng is also the head of what’s called the Joint Body. The group of employees and management representatives collects a premium from every fair trade rose sold by Panda and then invests the money in community projects.
The group has invested in various ventures in Naivasha town, from HIV/AIDS awareness raising, to solar energy, to creating school bursaries for the employees’ children.
Apart from the immediate benefits, fair trade in the flowerindustry could have a trickle-down effect on other industries in Kenya where employees are exploited, Wanguhu said.
“As long as someone is doing it already, it reflects across all industries and people begin adopting better practices,” he said, highlighting the coffee and tea industries which have begun cutting out middle-men who often make unjustly high commissions from their work.
But despite all the benefits, fair trade is catching on slowly, with the majority of flower farms working under standards set by the independent Kenya Flower Council or the government, which are not as stringent. Human rights groups say there are still complaints of worker exploitation - both from employees of fair trade certified farms and others.
Kinuthia the junior supervisor, however, who said she is satisfied with her daily grind, is hopeful that other farms and industries will latch on to the idea soon.
“If fair trade continues, I know that in 10 years or so our whole country will be improved.”