Roses are extolled by the choir of angels in Goethe’s Faust. One hundred seventy years later, they are said to be the reason for apocalypse in Mark Seal’s biography on environmentalist Joan Root. He depicts their production at Lake Naivasha as ‘resulting in slums, squalor, crime’ (Seal 2010, iv). Roses elicit controversial accounts not only in prose and documentaries. These accounts also represent the two faces of roses in their biographies and geographies. In Europe, every day millions of them are bought for cheap prices as a gift or as decoration. In Kenya, every day millions of them are produced under disputed social and environmental conditions. Over the last 40 years, cut flowers have become one of the many agricultural commodities whose production has shifted from the Global North to the Global South. In the countries of the Global South, roses have brought foreign currencies and created employment. At the same time, low wages and the exploitation of nature are the backbones of this upswing. Lake Naivasha, just 80 km north-west of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, is one of the new centres of cut flower production. Since its beginnings in the 1970s, flower farms have spread along its shores and created one of the most productive agro-industrial clusters in Eastern Africa. Over the last 20 years, flowers have also become one of the many agricultural commodities that are sold by corporate retail chains in Europe. Many supermarkets offer ready-made bouquets of roses for less than five Euros in their entrance areas.

This book aims to show how these two processes – the shift of cut flower production to equatorial countries and the shift of cut flower sales to supermarkets – relate to each other. It will explore how the entry of European retail chains into the market links to both its expansion and the creation of new dynamics within it, as well as to ensuing crises and conflicts in the cut flower industry at Lake Naivasha.