To this day, all Kenyan children learn about pyrethrum in school as part of the national curriculum, according to Immaculate Maina, who oversees Nakuru County’s agriculture, livestock, and fisheries.
When Kenya declared independence in 1963, pyrethrum was so important that Kenya’s Coat of Arms featured several of the white and yellow flowers alongside a Masai warrior shield and underneath the feet of two lions. By the early 1960s it had become Kenya’s third-largest crop, after coffee and tea, supplying more than 70 percent of the pyrethrum in the world and employing some 200,000 farmers. British colonizers brought it to Kenya in the late 1920s, and by 1940 Kenya had replaced Japan as the world’s leading pyrethrum producer. Learning from pyrethrum’s pastīack when Kibett was growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, Kenya grew nearly all of the pyrethrum in the world. Half a dozen butcheries opened up shop, because people could use their pyrethrum earnings to buy meat. “It brought a lot of good things to our villages,” Kibett says. Kibett’s parents dried the flowers and sold them to Kenya’s state-run pyrethrum monopoly, using the money to pay the children’s school fees and later, Kibett’s university degree. And they tend to grow exceptionally quickly immediately following both of Kenya’s rainy seasons, earning farmers a twice-yearly bonus.
“It was exciting because as young kids your parents would tell you, ‘If you fill this container I’m going to buy you a sweet.’ So we were competing,” he says.īecause flowers can be harvested every two weeks, they generate a stable income for growers nearly year-round. Growing up in Bomet County, in western Kenya, Kibett and his siblings picked the flowers on the family farm. And it is user friendly.”įor Kibett, the delicate flower also has a special place in his heart for a very personal reason: It paid for his education and made his career. “It is natural, organic, and it has no environmental effects. “Pyrethrin is the most important insecticide in the world,” says Joel Maina Kibett, chief agriculture officer of Nakuru County, a three-hour drive north of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. Right: Joel Maina Kibett, head of the agriculture department at the County Government of Nakuru, is a committed supporter of the revival of pyrethrum farming in the county. Manufactured in spiral-shaped discs known as mosquito coils, they emit a shroud of smoke like incense that repels mosquitoes but is harmless to humans. Pyrethrin has also become a powerful tool in the global fight against mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, a parasite that sickens more than a million people and kills more than 400,000 each year, many of them in Kenya. The resulting rash can eat away at people’s faces and become fatal if left untreated.
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Simply growing Chrysanthemum cinerariifolium near your home may be enough to repel parasite-carrying sand flies, whose bite can spread the skin disease leishmaniasis, which affects nearly one million people globally, including many throughout Kenya. “If you spray an insect with pyrethrum, for the first 30 seconds it goes mental, incredibly hyperactive, then it falls to the floor,” explains Ian Shaw, managing director of the pyrethrum producer Kapi Limited. In its most common applications, pyrethrin paralyzes pests by attacking their central nervous systems. Herders rub pyrethrin ointments on their cattle to repel flies and ticks.
But bugs beware: Its yellow center contains a natural toxin that can kill them in seconds.ĭiscovered in Persia around 400 B.C., the flower produces an active ingredient, pyrethrin, that can be extracted and used to create natural insecticides that farmers spray on crops to protect them from mites, ants, and aphids without harming anyone’s health. To the people who pick them, the flower is utterly harmless.
Each morning in the hills above Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, the white petals of the pyrethrum plant become laden with dew. Gilgil, KenyaThe deadliest flower in the insect world is soft to the touch.
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