With Flights Grounded, Kenya ’s Produce Wi lts

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Een internationale markt, zonder thuis markt!

Groet / Cees

April 19, 2010
With Flights Grounded, Kenya’s Produce Wilts
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/world/africa/20kenya.html
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — When Kenneth Maundu, general manager for Sunripe
produce exporters, first heard about a volcano erupting in Iceland, he
was excited. “I thought, ‘Oh, wow, a volcano,’ ” he said.

And then reality hit him in the face like a hurled tomato.

Because Kenya’s gourmet vegetable and cut-flower industry exports mainly
to Europe, and because the cloud of volcanic ash has grounded flights to
much of northern Europe since Thursday, the Kenyan horticultural
business has been waylaid like never before.

On Monday, Mr. Maundu stared at the towering wreckage: eight-feet-tall
heaps of perfectly good carrots, onions, baby sweet corn and deliciously
green sugar snap peas being dumped unceremoniously into the back of a
pickup truck.

“Cow food,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s about all we can do with
it now.”

If farmers in Africa’s Great Rift Valley ever doubted that they were
intricately tied into the global economy, they know now that they are.
Because of a volcanic eruption more than 5,000 miles away, Kenyan
horticulture, which is a critical piece of the national economy , is
losing $3 million a day and shedding thousands of jobs.

The pickers are not picking. The washers are not washing. Temporary
workers have been told to go home because refrigerated warehouses at the
airport are stuffed with ripening fruit, vegetables and flowers, and
there is no room for more until planes can come and take away the
produce. Already, millions of roses, lilies and carnations have wilted.

“Volcano, volcano, volcano,” grumbled Ronald Osotsi, whose $90-a-month
job scrubbing baby courgettes, which are zucchinis, and French beans is
now endangered. “That’s all anyone is talking about.”

He sat on a log outside a vegetable processing plant in Nairobi, next to
other glum-faced workers eating a cheap lunch of fried bread and beans.

Election-driven riots, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and stunningly bad
harvests have all left their mark on Kenya’s agriculture industry, which
is based in the Rift Valley, Kenya’s breadbasket and the cradle of mankind.

But industry insiders say they have never suffered like this.

“It’s a terrible nightmare,” said Stephen Mbithi, the chief executive
officer of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya. He rattled
off some figures: Two million pounds of fresh produce are normally
shipped out of Kenya every night. Eighty-two percent of that goes to
Europe and 37 percent to Britain, whose airports have been among those
suffering most from the effects of the volcano’s eruption. Five thousand
Kenyan field hands have been laid off in the past few days, and others
may be jobless soon. The only way to alleviate this would be to restore
the air bridge to Europe, which would necessitate the equivalent of 10
Boeing 747s of cargo space — per night.

“There is no diversionary market,” Mr. Mbithi explained. “Flowers and
courgettes are not something the average Kenyan buys.”

Thus, the trash heap of greens. At Sunripe, one of the most profitable
sides of the business is prepackaging veggies for supermarkets in
Europe. Most of the peppers, corn, carrots, broccoli and beans are grown
in the Rift Valley, trucked to Nairobi, and then washed, chopped and
shrink-wrapped. There are even some packages labeled “stir fry,” which
few Kenyans have ever heard about.

The vegetables are marked with the names of some of England’s biggest
supermarkets. (They requested not to be mentioned in this article.) But
those supermarkets are very particular about their brands and do not
allow Sunripe to give away excess produce with their labels on it.

So, on Monday, a man in a Sunripe lab coat and mesh hair net stood at
the back of the pickup truck in the company’s loading bay tearing open
plastic bags of perfectly edible vegetables, each worth a couple
dollars, and shaking out the contents. Sunripe does give away unpackaged
food, and two nuns from an orphanage stood nearby, waiting for some
French beans.

Upstairs, Tiku Shah, whose family owns Sunripe, shouted into his cellphone.

“Give us half the plane, you take half, we take half!” he said to someone.

“Arusha and Dar are also packed,” he followed up, referring to two
Tanzanian cities whose warehouses were full.

Before he hung up, he said, “I’m waiting for Raila to call.”

Raila Odinga is Kenya’s prime minister, and exporters are hoping that
the Kenyan government will help defray the costs of organizing special
cargo flights to ship out produce.

No one here knows when the flight chaos will end. Countless tourists are
also stranded in Kenya, although many of them are on spotless white-sand
beaches.

By Monday afternoon, a few tons of vegetables had been flown to Spain,
where airports had reopened. From there, the produce will be trucked the
rest of the way to northern Europe.

“The cost is doubling,” Mr. Shah said. “But we don’t have a choice. If
we don’t have product on the shelves, our customers will look for
alternatives.”

Among them, he said, Guatemala was a rising threat, along with North
Africa.

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