Human Flower Project

Politics

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Who’s Protecting Lake Naivasha?

Lake Naivasha is at the center of Kenya’s flower production, but now, despite a self-regulating flower council, the lake’s fish are dying. Can the industry adequately police itself?

Workers at one of the flower farms of the Lake Naivasha region of Kenya: horticulture employs half a million Kenyan people.
Photo: The East African

Kenya’s flower industry, after years of success that have induced many other African nations to jump into floral production, took a big hit last year. According to the East African, income in this sector was down a third last year. Flower council chief Jane Ngige reports that for “the first time in close to 20 years, the flower industry has registered negative growth.”

In the past month there’s been more bad news, the mysterious die-off of more than 1000 fish in Lake Naivasha, where the flower farms are concentrated. Both Kenyan environmentalists and now the national authorities are focussing their investigation on several flower farms, which many say have been flouting standards and polluting the lake.

From what we can tell, the flower industry is completely self-regulated in Kenya, an arrangement that has served many law-abiding farms—and their employees—well. Most Kenyan flowers sell in Europe, where there’s strong demand for produce—including flowers—that’s responsibly grown and traded. But Europe’s flower sales have steeply declined during the 18+month global economic downturn: this blotch on the reputation of Kenyan flowers couldn’t come at a worse time. As well as the health of the lake, there are a reported 500,000 jobs at stake in Kenya’s horticulture sector.

The Kenyan growers association hopes to protect its system of self-regulation (see Ngige’s editorial), but that system seems to have failed. As a native Kentuckian who’s seen what happened when coal operators policed mining, we have to ask, could the Kenyan government—or some other more independent authority—do better? Would it do better?

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

February 16: Dictator Theorists

On the 68th (or is it 69th?) birthday of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, speculators read floral clues and predict his successor.

Officials in Pyongyang at the convocation Feb. 16, 2010 to honor Kim Jong-Il’s birthday. Red kimjongilia begonias set the scene but the North Korean leader did not attend.
Photo: North Korea News Agency, via AP

“If we’ve done it at least once before, that makes it a ‘tradition,’” So our friend Clint remarked, about the human tendency to see patterns and march along accordingly (a tendency of ours, to be sure).
But what if it’s happened TWICE, Clint? We are thinking of course of North Korea, this being the birthday of its leader Kim Jong-Il, thus the biggest celebration of the year there.

As we’ve described before here, February 16th is a huge human flower project in Pyongyang, as public spaces in the capital are swathed in the national flower “Kimjongilia,” a bright red begonia named for you-know-who. The begonia was a gift to the nation in 1988; we’d always heard that its breeding was commissioned by Kim Il-Sung, then the North Korean leader, to honor his beloved son and dictator-in-waiting.

Kim Il-Sung, too, had been honored with a flower, a purple orchid which was a gift from Indonesia’s president Sukarno in 1965. Ceremonial occasions in North Korea (well, the two leaders’ birthdays ARE the ceremonial occasions here) always feature huge displays of the two plants in bloom.

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Illegal Flowers: ‘Feifa Xianhua’

Chinese authorities try to squelch the complaints of Google and its many users, restricting even floral protests of online censorship.

After Google announced it might suspend its Chinese operations, citizens brought flowers to the company
headquarters in Beijing (shown here) and Shanghai.
Photo: Josh Chin, via WSJ

After conforming to the Chinese government’s limitations on Internet use (a.k.a. rules of censorship) for nearly four years, Google made a public turn last Tuesday, signaling that it may close its operations here. The company reportedly changed its tune after detecting that hackers had tried to infiltrate google.cn, “violating its network and identifying advocates for human rights and democratic reform in China.”

As Google scuttles to moral high-ground, some commentators say that image management and simple economics spurred the company’s announcement rather than commitment to free speech.

At present, our interest is less in Google’s ethics than in the response of Chinese citizens. Many have brought floral tributes to the company’s headquarters in Beijing and Shanghai to register their support for the global IT company and, presumably, to protest government censorship.

S.L. Shen wrote for UPI, “Since Wednesday morning (Jan. 13), security staff at the Tsinghua Science Park near Zhongguancun – China’s Silicon Valley – in northwest Beijing have been busy chasing away people who went to pay their respects to Google….

“According to the citizen reporters, security guards told the visitors that presenting flowers to Google was illegal without applying for prior approval from the authorities. Otherwise, their offerings were ‘illegal flower tributes.’”

News and images of these floral demonstrations began coursing through the Internet instantly via twitter and other social networking systems. So did a neologism in the human-flower lexicon.

“The newly coined Chinese term ‘feifa xianhua,’ meaning ‘illegal flower tribute,’ quickly spread in online forums. It even appeared as an entry in online encyclopedias like Wiki and Baidu, Google’s top competitor in China. But, unsurprisingly, this term was later ‘unable to be displayed’ on Baidu and microblogs provided by Sina Net in China.”

Matthew Robertson, writing for the Epoch Times, reported “The newly coined Chinese phrase (feifa xianhua) now garners 151,000 hits in Google (144,000 on Google.cn)”...and that was 6 days ago.

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Friday, December 04, 2009

Creeping Literalism

Symbolic slippage and a ceremonial flower in Japan—Allusionists, watch where you step!

‘Applause,” the blue rose developed by a Japanese company and presented as an emblem of collaboration and accomplishment to Barack Obama.
Photo: inventorspot

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, elected just this fall, hosted Barack Obama during the U.S. President’s recent trip to Asia.

In his weekly address, Hatoyama narrated a human flower project of diplomacy: “At the beginning of the (official state) dinner, I presented President Obama with a single blue rose.” 

Hatoyama wrote, “It was believed impossible to create a blue rose, since roses lack the gene to produce the color blue. However, a Japanese company spent 14 years in research and finally succeeded in developing the world’s first blue rose. I explained to President Obama how this blue rose, which holds the meaning ‘to accomplish the impossible,’ was created and said, ‘Let us work together to accomplish the impossible.’”

Yesterday, writers on the global economic weblog Euromoney went after the prime minister’s gesture with symboli-cide.

“Having campaigned against his opponent’s 50-year policy of spending huge amounts of public money on unneeded public works projects,” wrote the Euromoney editorialists, “Hatoyama might have paused to consider whether his anecdote about an expensive and idiosyncratic 14-year project to create a blue flower might best demonstrate his new ethos. ‘We can accomplish the impossible,’ it says, leaving the listener to supply the concluding, ‘whether it’s a good idea or not.’”

We must come to the prime minister’s defense – not to justify blue roses, which we find peculiar, but to combat onesidedness. In this era of “transparency,” our capacity for symbolic thinking and figures of speech seems to be shrink wrapped. The fine and risky thing about symbols is that they invite multiple interpretations. Whereas for the prime minister the blue rose signifies accomplishment, for the editorialists it suggests frivolity or, worse, unnatural, nefarious and ultimately perilous meddling. (Quite probably, the genetic modifications behind the blue rose touched off this sour reaction; European societies have been most vociferously anti-GM.)

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