Once destined for Dubai, Riyadh, Tehran and Doha, the flowers grown by Ngari Mahihu on the slopes below Mount Kenya are now being fed to his sheep.
“When my sheep break wind, it smells of roses,” he said, recounting one of the more bizarre and far-flung consequences of the decision by US President Donald Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bomb Iran in February.
Since Tehran hit back by firing drones and missiles at US allies in the Gulf — grounding cargo flights and closing off the Strait of Hormuz through which booming east African trade with the region used to flow — Mahihu has been forced to jettison millions of rose stems.
Overall, he has lost more than half of the export volumes from his 60-hectare farm near Nakuru. At least Russia, the UK and Australia, his other main markets, are holding up.
Kenya is the fourth-largest producer of cut flowers in the world and the largest exporter of black tea. Traders in Kenyan tea, flowers and fresh produce are all suffering from the effects of the Middle East war.
They have seen markets cut off, profit margins slashed as transport and input costs soar, and losses mount as perishable produce rots or lies unsold in warehouses.
Many Kenyan livelihoods are at risk should the stand-off between Trump and the Iranians persist, representative associations have warned.
“The Middle East developed into being a very big flower consumer and also a hub, so that, for example, from my farm here we do about 1mn stems a week into that market,” Mahihu said, adding that most of the flowers from his Baraka Roses company go to wholesalers in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
There is also a strong flower culture in Iran itself, he said: “If you are visiting someone, you take flowers, if you are waiting for someone at the airport, you take flowers.”
Major air freight operators halted flights from Kenya after Gulf airports were struck by Iranian drones and missiles. Those airlines still lifting cargo were charging three times normal freight rates, Mahihu said.
Chaotic and unreliable scheduling, and priority access for fresh vegetables, has made it impractical for flower sellers to continue doing business: the Gulf cities’ emptying hotels have cancelled orders and large numbers of expatriates who were also big customers have gone home.
The higher freight rates are also having an impact on exports to Europe, according to industry reports. Florists such as Interflora and Bloom & Wild import a large portion of their flowers from Kenya.
Kenya’s floriculture industry is one of the country’s top foreign exchange earners, generating nearly $900mn annually and supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly, according to the Kenya Flower Council.
“The current challenges therefore have far-reaching implications — not only for exporters, but also for employment, rural livelihoods, and the country’s broader economic stability,” the council said in a statement.
UK-based Bloom & Wild said its flower imports from Kenya were an important part of its sustainability strategy because the air-freighted stems typically had a carbon footprint 50-80 per cent lower than those grown in heated greenhouses in Europe. The company has introduced small price increases on some products because of higher freight costs.
Kenya’s tea industry, the largest in Africa with roots dating back to colonial times, last year exported 600,000 tonnes worth $1.4bn to markets including Pakistan, Egypt and the UK. It too has been hard hit.
According to the East Africa Tea Trade Association, the Middle East accounts for 20-25 per cent of exports, with losses running at $8mn a week since March 1 as a result of disruption caused by the war. Millions of kilos of leaves have been held up at the port of Mombasa, where regional tea auctions take place.
Nick Munyi, a tea trader in Mombasa and former chair of the EATTA, said that initially “everything came to a standstill”. Consignments that would normally have gone to the Gulf have since been rerouted to Colombo in Sri Lanka, where congestion has led to severe delays in transshipment.
Due to the continuing threat from Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis in the Red Sea, trade that would normally have gone past the Bab el-Mandeb strait to Egypt has also been redirected — around South Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. These longer routes have inflated costs, and caused hold-ups in payments.
“The cash flow problem has affected the whole tea supply chain,” said Munyi, adding that farmers would ultimately bear the brunt of all the chaos even if the price of a cup of tea also rises for consumers.
In Pakistan, the biggest importer of Kenyan tea, traders have been left waiting months for shipments. “We normally import two containers a month,” said Syed Wali, a trader based in Quetta, with about 60 per cent sold to Pakistani customers and the remainder across the border into Afghanistan.
But he said he was still waiting for shipments that should have arrived in February. “We have many too many difficulties after the situation in the Middle East.”
Should the crisis persist, Mahihu said he would have to send some of the 1,200-1,500 workers on his rose farm on unpaid leave. But he took heart from an adage: “We are great believers that nothing lasts forever — even Trump,” he said.