Now Kenya’s flower sector shrinks 33pc after 20-year bloom

“This is a better option than closing down,” said Fpeak chief executive officer Stephen Mbithi.

Indeed, the Horticultural Crops Development Authority reports that while flower prices have dipped, those for fruits and vegetables have risen due to scarcity as the dry weather prevails.

The price of vegetables has more than doubled, drawing flower exporters into the business, until now the preserve of small-scale producers.

The flip side is that this trend could knock out of business some of the hundreds of thousands of smallholders, reversing the gains made by the sector over the years in creating rural employment.

Mrs Ngige said that in the country’s main growing area of Naivasha, flower farms have agreed to scale down production by almost 25 per cent as they go slow on irrigation to save the drying lake.

The Naivasha Municipal Council and the Water Resources Management Authority have installed metres and introduced a water rationing programme to control extraction. Otherwise, the lake could dry up for the third — and perhaps last — time.

Meanwhile, the decision by the world’s second largest producer of flowers, Columbia, to dump its produce in Europe following the collapse of the US market is dealing a major blow to Kenya’s flower sector.

The first sign that the flower industry was headed for trouble this year was the low-key celebration of Valentine’s Day. It was billed as the worst in history for flower exports.

“We had a terrible February 14, with earnings dipping 30 per cent,” said  Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya CEO Stephen Mbithi.

Dr Mbithi added that there was a slight improvement in May because of Mother’s Day, the second most important day in the flower sales calendar.

But that was the only good news of the year, as the sector went into the cold season, when growth is subdued.

Lobbyists now want the government to implement reforms to save 500,000 jobs in the horticultural sector.