Cape Town - Over the past four years, an unprecedented increase in illegal succulent poaching has been observed within the Succulent Karoo region, with tens of thousands of rare and whimsical plants leaving South Africa through local plant poaching syndicates to supply traders and collectors overseas, largely to Asia.
In 2020, while the government, businesses and society scrambled to respond to Covid-19, the large-scale removal of wild and unique plants through illegal collection was beginning to gain momentum and threaten the country’s biodiversity.
South African National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) spokesperson Nontsikelelo Mpulo said this increase in global demand for the country’s collectable “ornamental” plants over the past few years was because South Africa’s rich botanical diversity of unique species, including leafy succulents, caudiciform succulents and bulbs, were prized in internation al markets for their alluring characteristics and rarity.
Many of the species targeted are restricted endemic species occurring at a single location, making them highly vulnerable to being poached to extinction.
“At present, the practice has been somewhat re-organised, with local South Africans now involved in the wide-scale removal of wild plants to supply middlemen, traders and collectors overseas.
“The scale of illegal collection and trade has increased dramatically over the past few years, most notably within the Succulent Karoo region, with severe impacts for many species and no tangible socio-economic benefits accruing to the country,” Mpulo said.
This week, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Cape Nature and Sanbi spotlighted that there was a worrying number of organised crime syndicates operating in the illegal trade in South African succulent flora.
Paul Gildenhuys, a CapeNature enforcement specialist in biodiversity conservation, said the illegal succulent trade was able to boom with the introduction of local plant poaching syndicates in the Western Cape and Northern Cape after Covid-19 – because international travel was restricted, these international traders and collectors were unable to travel to South Africa and grab these collectable plant species themselves.
Through social media and online websites, these international traders were able to connect with locals and pay them to dig up the succulents and then courier them to reach the international markets. Through this, a number of plant poaching syndicates erupted.
“The Succulent Karoo is experiencing an unprecedented onslaught by plant poachers supplying international markets. Some of South Africa’s rare and endemic plant species are being poached to extinction,” Gildenhuys said.
CapeNature biodiversity compliance office Carl Brown said there were five tiers to an organised crime syndicate in this operation: first was the poacher which could be an individual or group (these were locals); second was the transporters and couriers; third were the buyers and facilitators; fourth was the exporters; and fifth was the foreign buyer.
Brown highlighted that even the trafficking methods used by these syndicates were becoming organised.
He referred to a specific case they picked up in which a worker at a FedEx facility thought it was odd when he noticed a variety of toy packages with the label “made in China”, being sent to China.
The worker flagged the packages and it was discovered that they contained poached succulents meant to be couriered from South Africa to handlers in China.
Mpulo said: “In the past four years, confiscated material has increased annually by over 20%. By May 2023, there have been 650 different species and more than 1.2 million wild harvested plants seized.
“While law enforcement and reporting of the illegal harvesting is proving valuable, it is suspected that less than 25% of the trade is intercepted by enforcement officials, and it is likely that over 1.5 million plants have been removed from the wild in the past three years.”