Introduction

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Isaac Ouma Oloo remembers Kenya’s Lake Naivasha as pristine, its waters sustaining an abundance of fish, lions, antelope, leopards, hippopotamuses, and birds. But the overuse of water and environmental destruction caused by international flower farms have fouled his memories of the lake. “Kenya is a begging country,” he says. “We’re among the top on the list of the World Food Programme for food donations, even though in Naivasha we have a freshwater lake that would allow us to grow food to feed ourselves. Yet we take this water to grow flowers and then ship them 5,000 miles to Europe so that people can say ‘I love you, darling’ and then throw them away three days later. To me that is an immoral act.” ¹

Since the 1980s, industrial horticulture and floriculture farms in Kenya, centered for the most part in the Lake Naivasha region, have grown into the largest supplier of flowers to the European market. They ship more than 88 million tons of cut flowers a year, worth some $264 million.²

The more than 30 flower farms in the Lake Naivasha region pose a number of serious ecological problems for Kenya’s rivers and for the lake, including loss of water, an unsustainable increase in the population because of the laborers they have attracted, and the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers.

In  2007, while researching The Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and President of the Food & Water Watch Board of Directors, learned of the crisis at Lake Naivasha and committed herself to visiting the lake during the World Social Forum in Nairobi during the winter of that year. Barlow, Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, and documentary filmmaker Sam Bozzo bribed their way into one of the local flower farm facilities.³

“We saw pipes pumping water from the lake to the flower greenhouses and a ditch where waste water drained back into the lake,” Bar-low says. “Pesticides and fungicides were plainly visible in a storage facility on the property. If action isn’t taken immediately, the lake will not only be polluted, it will be drained.” ⁴

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