Human Flower Project
Orrington, MAINE USA
Murrieta, CALIFORNIA USA
Princeton, MAINE USA
Friday, September 05, 2008
‘Give Me Land, Lots of Land…’
Flower farming, a venture with promise in Africa, is stagnating in many nations as “land reform” runs aground. And there are other high hurdles ahead.
Zimbabwe lands
Source: FAS/USDA
As recently as twenty years ago, Africa’s flowers were minor leaguers in the global flower market. That’s not so today, as Kenya (principally) but now also Ethiopia and more southerly African countries plow ahead. They hope to best South America and China by likewise capitalizing on sunshine, cheap labor and open land.
But whose land is it? Confusion and, in some nations, violence over that question have made flower farming enormously risky business. Brigitte Weidlich’s story of a cut flower operation in Namibia is fresh, and representative. She writes of the Wiese family’s 90 year old farm, Ongombo West near Windhoek, which once “exported arum lilies to the Netherlands worth several millions of Namibia dollars annually.”
In 2004, it was the first farm to be expropriated by the Namibian government, after a labor dispute. The white owners had to relinquish their rights to the property. In the years since, according to Weidlich’s report, the farm has been idle; “all infrastructure, including the large green houses for the defunct flower export business, has deteriorated.” Six “erstwhile farmers” who were resettled there to work the land have had to hire out on neighboring farms. And now the national Ministry of Lands has posted a want ad, hoping to attract “experienced and reputed engineering companies for the assessment of rehabilitation required for existing irrigation infrastructure.”
A Namibian official calls the situation at Ongombo West “a delicate issue”—another way of saying “big flat flop.”