NAIROBI, Kenya -- When Kenneth Maundu, general manager for Sunripe produce exporters, first heard about a volcano erupting in Iceland, he was excited. "I thought, 'Oh, wow, a volcano,"' he said.
And then reality hit him in the face like a hurled tomato.
Because Kenya's gourmet vegetable and cut-flower industry exports mainly to Europe, and because the cloud of volcanic ash has grounded flights to much of northern Europe since Thursday, the country's horticultural business has been waylaid as never before.
On Monday, Maundu stared at the towering wreckage: 8-feet-tall heaps of perfectly good carrots, onions, baby sweet corn and deliciously green sugar snap peas being dumped into the back of a pickup truck.
"Cow food," he said, shaking his head. "That's about all we can do with it now."
If farmers in Africa's Great Rift Valley ever doubted that they were intricately tied into the global economy, they know now that they are. Because of a volcanic eruption more than 5,000 miles away, Kenyan horticulture, which as the top foreign exchange earner, is a critical piece of the national economy, is losing $3 million a day and shedding jobs.
The pickers are not picking. The washers are not washing. Temporary workers have been told to go home because refrigerated warehouses at the airport are stuffed with ripening fruit, vegetables and flowers, and there is no room for more until planes can take away the produce. Already, millions of roses, lilies and carnations have wilted.
"Volcano, volcano, volcano," grumbled Ronald Osotsi, whose $90-a-month job scrubbing baby courgettes, or zucchinis, and French beans is now endangered. "That's all anyone is talking about."
He sat on a log outside a vegetable processing plant in Nairobi, next to other glum-faced workers eating a cheap lunch of fried bread and beans.
Election-driven riots, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and stunningly bad harvests have all left their mark on Kenya's agriculture industry, which is based in the Rift Valley, Kenya's breadbasket and the cradle of humankind.
But industry insiders say they have never suffered like this.
"It's a terrible nightmare," said Stephen Mbithi, the chief executive officer of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya.
"There is no diversionary market," Mbithi explained. "Flowers and courgettes are not something the average Kenyan buys."
Giving it away
On Monday, a man in a Sunripe lab coat and mesh hair net stood at the back of the pickup truck in the company's loading bay tearing open plastic bags of perfectly edible vegetables, each worth a couple of dollars, and shaking out the contents. Sunripe does give away unpackaged food, and two nuns from an orphanage stood nearby, waiting for some French beans.
No one here knows when the flight chaos will end. Countless tourists also are stranded in Kenya, although many of them on spotless white-sand beaches.
By Monday afternoon, a few tons of vegetables had been flown to Spain, where airports had reopened. From there, the produce will be trucked the rest of the way to northern Europe.
"The cost is doubling," Shah said. "But we don't have a choice. If we don't have product on the shelves, our customers will look for alternatives."
