The rose industry and the new rurban links: case study from east Africa
Résumé
Since the 1980's, starting from Kenyan, then spreading to neighboring countries, the rose industry has tremendously risen in East Africa which now supplies one third of the European and Russian markets. Originally, it was set up by Western companies in their search to escape high energy prices in post 1973 oil-shock Europe. Build upon foreign capital and know how, it targets equatorial highlands where it relies mainly on access to cheap land (whatever the origin is: whether colonial or postcolonial), exploitation of cheap salaries and quiet man power and free environmental services such as water, light and sun energy. It also relies on tax arrangements and exemption. One condition for such investments to be profitable is the proximity of a reliable international airport. With time, beside foreign investors, local investors have appeared. As a geographical result, the industry as a whole has built a hybrid structure: agriculturally oriented, morphologically and sociologically "rurban" and directly berthed to international metropolis with a smooth cool-chain. This type of structure seems quite new for Sub Saharan Africa. The paper will focus on describing the fabric of such new localized productive systems based on Eastern Africa examples. It fits with the panel's topic in that it aims at analyzing the new rural-urban links in Africa.