**Flower industry incurs Sh180 million losses per week**
Kenya’s floriculture sector, one of the country’s most significant foreign exchange earners, is bleeding more than Sh180 million every week as the prolonged conflict in the Middle East continues to disrupt global air cargo networks and compress demand in key markets.
The losses stem from a combination of sharply higher freight charges and a reduction in available belly-cargo capacity on commercial flights serving routes that connect Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to Europe and the Gulf. Airlines have rerouted or cancelled services over conflict-affected airspace, increasing journey times and costs while reducing the number of viable cargo slots available to Kenyan exporters.
Kenya is the world’s third-largest exporter of cut flowers, supplying roughly 38 percent of flowers sold in the European Union. The sector employs an estimated 150,000 people directly, with hundreds of thousands more in ancillary industries such as packaging, cold-chain logistics and farm inputs. The Naivasha and Mount Kenya regions, which host the majority of the country’s flower farms, are already showing signs of strain, with some smaller operations reducing working hours and deferring planting cycles.
Industry body the Kenya Flower Council has urged the government to negotiate preferential cargo rates with local carriers and to accelerate talks with alternative transit hubs in order to reduce dependency on Gulf routing. Growers are also exploring sea-freight options for hardier flower varieties, though perishability remains a fundamental constraint for premium roses and carnations.
The crisis arrives at a difficult moment for an industry still recovering from the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered European markets for months and forced mass layoffs across the sector. Sustained freight disruptions, growers warn, risk permanently shifting European buyer relationships toward competing exporters in Ethiopia and Colombia.
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