Aid Thoughts

I was walking around south London with a friend on Saturday, discussing how nice it was to have the sky devoid of airplanes on such a clear, sunny day. Then I got home and was reminded by Owen Barder that I should actually be feeling quite guilty about enjoying the lack of air transport:

This evening here in Addis Ababa I bumped into the owner of one of the big flower-exporting businesses.  He was looking pensive.  Unseasonal rain had damaged part of his crop, and now he is unable to get his roses into European markets.  A whole container had had to be destroyed because there was nowhere for them to go.  On the back of an envelope, he calculated that the blockage of rose exports is costing Ethiopia about €200k a day. This may not sound very much but it is a big chunk of the export earnings of a poor nation.

The BBC reports on a similar situation in Kenya, where the flower industry might be losing up to $2 million a day due to the crisis.

According to the Kenya Flower Council, 97% of all Kenya's flower exports are sent to the European Union. About 300 growers employ an estimated 100,000 people, with about 1.2m people deriving their livelihood from the flower export industry.

.... some staff had already been sent home until it became clear when flights would resume again.

The Kenyan flower trade was already hit quite hard by the post-election violence two years ago, when exports were reduced by a quarter due to violence disruption and a decline in tourism-driven passenger flights, which are used to ferry the flowers to the EU. If the current flight ban continues on for a few days, the potential damage to African export industries could be much greater.

So yes, feel sorry for BBC listener Mayank Sharma, who is bored of watching CNN on his hotel room television, but while the overall cost might be incurred by Europe, the severity of the crisis could be much greater down south.