This report examines how Brexit could unsettle the flower trade linking Kenya, the Netherlands and Britain. Industry executives warned that new border rules could slow shipments, add costs and force major changes to a supply chain built for speed.
At Royal FloraHolland near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in Aalsmeer, chief operating officer Yme Pasma was focused on the practical problem of moving flowers across a future border. The marketplace handles about 12 billion flowers and plants a year, more than one-third of global trade in blooms, and much of that volume moves through a tightly timed auction and distribution system.
Flowers arrive from Holland, Africa, Asia and Latin America, are sorted by computer-guided forklifts, and are sent on to buyers around the world. Nearly $1 billion worth of the product a year is destined for the United Kingdom, which at the time was still in the European Union. Under the existing arrangement, flowers from outside Europe could clear customs and continue to Britain without further interruption.
The concern was that, once Britain left the bloc, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom would become separate markets. That would mean customs checks, sanitary inspections and possibly tariffs on goods crossing the Channel unless a new deal prevented the disruption.
Pasma said the industry could not simply absorb the change without preparation. “At both sides, the governments are very willing to prepare, but still you need hundreds of people, and you need to train them, and you need warehouses to do the checks, and you have to build the computer systems,” he said. “There are going to be major traffic jams in the Netherlands. If it happens tomorrow, it’s going to be a huge problem.”
The same uncertainty was felt in Kenya, where women — overwhelmingly women — work in greenhouses near Lake Naivasha, northwest of Nairobi, cutting roses for export. The flowers are trucked to Nairobi airport and flown to Europe and the Middle East, with an increasing share going directly to Britain instead of first passing through the Dutch hub.
Kenya’s exports to Britain had been covered by the European Union’s trade agreement with Kenya, which allowed flowers to enter tariff-free. After Brexit, Britain would need its own arrangement with Kenya and other exporters. Until that happened, flowers shipped from Kenya to Britain could face tariffs of nearly 7 percent, a serious risk for an industry that provides many jobs in East Africa.
Even so, most Kenyan roses bound for Britain still moved through the Netherlands, where the auction system depends on uninterrupted logistics. Traders in the glassed-in room above the warehouse floor bid on flowers through a network of electronic clocks and online exchanges, with participants as far away as China, Russia and the United States.
That system, Pasma said, could be weakened if merchants began dealing directly outside the marketplace. Larger companies might adapt, but smaller growers that rely on the auction could lose demand. He said he was considering separate streams for flowers arriving in Amsterdam and staying within Europe, and for those headed to post-Brexit Britain, which might need new administrative handling.
At the Dutch Flower Group, chief financial officer Harry Brockhoff said the company imported about 350 million euros a year into the United Kingdom, roughly half from the Netherlands. He had met British and European officials in recent months to push for continuity. If Britain remained aligned with European rules, he argued, flowers crossing the Channel should not need extra checks.
If not, Brockhoff said, Britain would have to rebuild the customs and phytosanitary inspection capacity it had before joining the European Union in 1973. “There is no certainty, so we have to prepare for the worst,” he said. “But I am hopeful that everybody wants to come to a decent solution.”
In London, the anxiety was just as visible at New Covent Garden Market, the country’s largest wholesale flower market, where about 80 percent of stock comes from the Netherlands. Florists, designers, wedding planners and funeral homes all depend on the early-morning supply chain.
Dennis Edwards, who runs one wholesale outlet, said he was worried about delays. He recalled the older system before Britain’s 1973 entry into the European Union, when customs officers at Dover could inspect shipments from Rotterdam and reject entire consignments over a single insect. He said that kind of disruption could return if Brexit forced Britain back to tighter border controls.
Edwards, who said he had supplied flowers for Princess Diana’s funeral and for the memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral after the 9/11 attacks, described Brexit as a step backward for the trade. His fear was simple: the words “Sorry we’ve let you down” could become common again.
For the flower business, the issue was not politics in the abstract. It was whether a system built on precision, speed and open borders could survive a new border regime between Britain and the continent.
