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Kenya: The journey of flowers to Europe

If you come home to a vase full of roses on Valentine’s Day in Europe there will be a good chance they were picked a few days earlier on the shores of Lake Naivasha in Kenya. The fertile Rift Valley soil, warm days and cool nights make for perfect flower-growing conditions.

The Netherlands still dominates the global horticulture industry, but Kenya is digging itself a growing niche. Its cut-flower exports increased 12-fold to 137,000 tonnes between 1988 and 2014 as buyers realised it was cheaper, and counter-intuitively greener, to fly blooms thousands of miles than to heat Dutch greenhouses. More than 30% of the European Union’s cut-flower imports now come from Kenya. Most are roses.

Read all about the journey traveled by these roses at The Economist
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