South Africa's unique succulents under threat from poachers

A booming illegal trade in rare succulents is threatening South Africa's unique plant life, with demand from collectors driving widespread poaching.

South Africa is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world when it comes to succulent plants, which are mostly located in the country's Northern and Western Cape, and especially in the Succulent Karoo Biome.

But succulents - plant species with fleshy leaves or parts that make them suited to surviving arid regions - are unique and this is driving a growing illegal poaching trade.

According to South Africa's Parliamentary Standing Committee on Local Government, Environmental Affairs and Development Planning, there is a marked increase in the illegal harvesting of protected species.

Politician David Bryant, a member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament, explains:

"It's estimated that about 2.5 million plants, succulents in particular, have been poached across the Western and Northern Cape since 2018. And we're not seeing a noted decrease. In fact, we are seeing an increase in the number of plants that are being poached," he says.

"This is a particularly attractive type of poaching for people to be involved in because it doesn't pose the same threat to life and limb as poaching of rhinos or other animals, often where poachers are themselves killed by enforcement agencies in the process," adds Bryant.

In the Cape Floristic Kingdom, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, there are over 9,000 species of plants, 70 percent of which exist nowhere else on Earth. Many of these are succulents and they make for easy picking for poachers.

The isolation of many of the locations where succulents can be found makes it hard to police the criminal networks targeting the plants. The effectiveness of current enforcement law is a matter of debate before South Africa's Parliament.

"The poaching of succulents is something that affects many people through a very diverse value chain that includes criminal networks, which also operate and trade in other illegal goods, including drugs. But most importantly, it is the fact that going forward, we may lose many very very important local biodiversity treasures in these succulents, which we'll never be able to get back again," says Bryant.

Growing demand

The demand for succulents is not just driven internationally but also by local socio-economic pressures, where poverty in isolated areas, such as the country's Northern Cape, is a contributor to the illegal trade.

Local authorities have seized over 2.5 million plants that have been poached since 2018, but many more are slipping through.

There are more than 4,700 succulent species in South Africa. Nine Conophytum species have become extinct in the wild and a significant proportion of the genus is now critically endangered.

According to the country's Cape Nature authorities, the escalating poaching of succulents within the broader environmental crime context is affecting biodiversity on a level never seen.

"We've had cases where 3,000 of the same species have been collected from the wild, and the issue we are having is that some species are only found in specific or single locality sites. So what then happens is when a huge amount has been removed from the wild we do classify this as extinct from the wild, which means that according to records, be it herbarium records and population statistics, when we go back and monitor those plants in the wild and we notice a decline, this is when we say that they're functionally extinct, meaning that there isn't enough for reproduction of those species," explains Emily Norma Kudze, senior scientific coordinator for the illegal succulent trade at South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI).

There have been some gains made against succulent poaching through a National Response Strategy involving multiple agencies, improved coordination, surveillance, and enforcement training, which has led to the arrest of some syndicate leaders.

However, ongoing demand for much rarer succulent plants internationally continues to place pressure on many species.

Organised crime syndicates often hire local collectors in South Africa to poach plants, which are then smuggled to hubs in Cape Town and Johannesburg and to international markets.

The South African National Biodiversity Institute has established a Succulent Poaching Working Group as a conservational response to manage the crisis.

"We are now having educational materials that are being shopped around different schools so that the locals in this area in the Namaqua region do understand that the Succulent Karoo is very important. We have restoration projects that we are doing as well as training of prosecutors to make them understand the severity of when plants are being taken from the wild," Kudze explains.

"Because of that, that is why we had cases where we have been handing sentences like 15 years for some people who have been caught taking plants out of the wild. So as much as it's a slow process, I would like to believe that in the past 5 or 6 years that we've been tackling this issue, we have gained very big momentum in pushing and also to reduce the amount of confiscations that are coming in because I think now people are seeing the severity of the crime when you take plants out of the wild," she adds.

South Africa's parliamentary portfolio committee responsible to the environment, remains concerned about the impact this is having on biodiversity in the country and believe urgent action and a coordinated response is needed.