PESHAWAR: For three scenic northwestern Pakistani hamlets bursting with blooms every spring, this time of year usually means fields of roses, marigold and jasmine are harvested for sale in the bigger cities. But this year, the villages of Bazid Khel, Shahab Khel and Suleman Khel south of Peshawar valley are wastelands of dying blossoms.
“It is very difficult to watch the flower fields wilting, especially when you have worked so hard to grow them,” flower farmer Inayat Rehman told Arab News, standing over rows of bent stalks.
As part of strict nationwide containment measures amid the coronavirus pandemic, Peshawar city and its surrounding areas are on lockdown, effectively paralyzing daily life and livelihoods.
But it’s a first for the region’s flower farmers.
Even at the peak of militancy, when these villages were involved in a bloody war, Rehman said, flowers had continued to sell to mark celebrations, weddings and funerals.
Now there is nobody around to buy his flowers, he said. Not even for the graves of their loved ones.
Just 30 minutes away from the green fields of Bazid Khel lies the heart of Peshawar city — also known as the city of flowers.
Before the lockdown, its bustling markets were a contrast to the scenic slopes of the flowering hamlets just a few miles away, from where the farmers would travel with their blooms every morning, loading them onto trucks bound for as far off as the federal capital, Islamabad.
“It is a very uncertain situation now,” Inam Jan, a farmer whose family has been growing flowers for several generations, told Arab News. “And each day, it’s getting worse and the growers are worried about their crops.
BACKGROUND
Dozens of farms grow flowers every season along the outskirts of Peshawar, and groups of villagers bring them to the city’s famous Ramdas Bazar to sell every morning.
Amid the imposed lockdown, Jan said the flowers didn’t even bring enough earnings for daily transport expenses from their fields to Peshawar’s markets.
Instead, desperate farmers were plucking and throwing their dying flowers into the river, or laying them in graveyards to honor the dead.
Dozens of farms grow flowers every season along the outskirts of Peshawar, and groups of villagers bring them to the city’s famous Ramdas Bazar to sell every morning, Jan said.
He added the farmers had spent several thousand rupees — a small fortune — on seeds, fertilizers, plowing and watering their beloved fields from their meager earnings, and all in waiting for the spring months. Flowers are a business related to happiness and grief ... even coffins need flowers, Jan said. But the virus, he added, had ruined all of life’s routines.
“Due to coronavirus, the spring season has passed without joy. Otherwise we farmers earn handsome amounts in March and April.”
Hajji Saboor, a leading businessman in the flower trade, said he would usually purchase flowers from villagers and send them on to Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
“Unlike other businesses, farmers can’t stop flower production,” he said. And it was impossible, he added, for farmers and traders to store their flowers if they were not sold off in the markets within days. “And so they are lost,” he said.
