Over the past 40 years, Lake Naivasha has developed into the biggest cut flower producing area in Africa. Located 80km north-west of Nairobi in the Kenyan Rift Valley at 2000m above sea level, the 180km² freshwater lake and its surroundings are home to approximately 50 flower farms. The Lake Naivasha cut flower industry has become a major production centre, especially for European traders and buyers, and is now deeply entangled in the worldwide cut flower network. Yet, ‘markets do not fall out of thin air’ (Berndt, Boeckler 2009, 536), and neither do production sites within markets. Agro-industrial centres such as Lake Naivasha have a variable and contingent spatio-temporality (Coe et al. 2008, 272). Therefore, it is key to outline the historical and geographical context to current marketisation processes. In Nevins and Peluso’s words:

In this chapter, I will shift the focus to Lake Naivasha as a place of production for the cut flower industry by scrutinising how this area emerged as an agroindustrial cluster. In order to do so, this chapter will first outline the historical framing of Lake Naivasha as an agro-industrial centre. Subsequently it will trace the current cut flower Actor-Network.

Historical development: Turning Lake Naivasha into an agro-industrial centre

Lake Naivasha’s history is often described as a leap from a pristine natural paradise to a densely populated, urbanised agro-industrial centre. According to Mark Seal’s biography on the Naivasha-based environmentalist Joan Root, Lake Naivasha was once ‘a wonderland of wildlife straight out of a Walt Disney film that … is like Doctor Doolittle times one thousand, where 1,200 hippos swim by day and mow the grass by night amid the music of the areas’ 350 species of birds’.