Catherine Mumbi knows the difficulties of working in Kenya's flower
sector. She was fired as a casual worker at a flower farm after taking time off
to recover from complications of the liver. But that was just the start of her
problems.
"When I felt better I went back but my superior demanded that I have
sex with him to keep my job," says Mumbi, who had taken two months off
while being hospitalised for her illness. "I declined."
"The following morning a watchman knocked on my door with a letter
saying my job was over and that I should immediately vacate the company's
compound," Mumbi tells IPS. "I have been jobless since then ...
I am surviving on the generosity of well wishers since December 2011."
There is a possibility that Mumbi's job could have also caused her illness
in the first place.
IPS visited a few flower farms in Naivasha, in Kenya's Rift Valley Province, where
access is restricted and the grounds are monitored by security guards. Here,
for hundreds of workers like Mumbi, a healthy rose means a shortened lifespan.
Inside the greenhouses measuring up to eight by 60 metres, all is quiet
except for the occasional supervisor barking orders. The plucking and trimming
goes on without a fuss as heaps of newly harvested roses keep piling up.
Even the smell of freshly-sprayed chemicals does not appear to interrupt the
order and discipline in the farms that have sprung up in Naiposha, a once
patchy terrain 30 kilometres away from the town of Naivasha.
According to Charles Kasuku, a social worker in Naivasha involved in a
previous audit on the working conditions in Kenya's flower sector, there are
instances where the labels of chemicals are changed to disguise them from being
identified as toxic.
For example, campaigning for the phasing out of methyl bromide, a highly
toxic poison, began as early as 1998. But there is evidence that the chemical
is still currently being used.
"This explains why incidences of patients with strange diseases are
being reported in health centres around flower farms," he tells IPS.
"Recently, a former worker died from what doctors said was chemical
complications."
Even as the horticulture earns billions for Kenya in foreign exchange, the very workers who toil hard pay with their health, and sometimes, with their lives.
