Chris Flowers, the managing director, enjoys the prospect that some avocados may soon travel to China, the most important rising consumer market, as he watches workers yank avocados from the treetops in a plantation owned by the Kenyan agricultural company Kakuzi.
Kenya, after years of advocating for market access, took advantage of Beijing's increased attention on trade with African nations to help close huge gaps. In January, Kenya signed an export agreement with China for fresh avocados.
No cargoes have departed after six months, according to Reuters reports from the Kenya Avocado Society, the country's plant health inspectorate, and Kakuzi (KUKZ.NR).
Despite the fact that 10 exporters of avocados have passed Kenyan inspections, China now wants to conduct its own audits. Based on the previous performance of some other African fruit growers, this may take many months.
The approval process might take ten years.
According to Stephen Karingi, director of trade at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, "You can genuinely have a market, but if you can't fulfil the requirements, you can't take advantage."
According to nine officials and companies contacted by Reuters from across Africa, Beijing's ambition to increase African imports is being undermined by Chinese red tape and a reluctance to reach broad trade agreements.
But one of the few alternatives that many African nations have to rebalance their economic relations with China and generate the hard money they require to repay mountains of debt, much of it owing to Beijing, is to increase agricultural exports.
Imagine Kenya. It has an annual trade imbalance with China of around $6.5 billion and debt to China of nearly $8 billion. It needs roughly $631 million to pay off that debt this year alone, but that is nearly three times the amount of exports it would send to China that year.
Now, several African countries claim they must increase exports to China because they simply cannot pay any more Chinese loans. China declared a change in approach in November, acknowledging the need to fix the imbalances or at the very least prevent them from growing worse.
President Xi Jinping proposed a number of efforts to increase China's imports from Africa to $300 billion over the next three years and $300 billion annually during a conference between China and Africa, which Beijing often uses to announce eye-popping loans.