By Temwani Mgunda

This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth

GLOBAL demand for Southern Africa’s unique succulent plants, many of them found in the Northern Cape, is fuelling an illegal trade that threatens them with extinction.

Between 2019 and May 2024, more than 1.6 million illegally harvested succulents, representing around 650 species, were seized by law enforcement in South Africa while being trafficked to overseas markets. The figures are revealed in a recent study by Traffic, an NGO working on the trade of wild animals and plants. Succulent exploitation raises serious environmental and conservation concerns.

Dominique Prinsloo, a lead researcher for Traffic, says “the allure of rare and exotic succulents” has exerted huge pressure, especially on wild populations from South Africa, leading to unsustainable harvesting and even extinction.

Succulent plants usually grow in arid regions and store water in their roots, leaves or stems, which makes them look fleshy and swollen.

Prinsloo says the succulents most commonly traded illegally are from the genus Conophytum, followed by the Eriospermum and Tylecodon genera.

Succulents have ecological value as habitat and economic value as food and medicine, says Carina Bruwer, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies who published a study on the issue in 2023.

Bruwer observes that plants like succulents, orchids and cycads, are in high demand for their aesthetic appeal.

“In addition to being rare, many succulent species have unique characteristics such as thick stems, miniature shapes and beautiful flowers,” she tells Dialogue Earth. “These features – and their evolutionary survival skills – make them highly sought after by plant collectors and gardeners globally, resulting in the species being traded worldwide.”

Disasters also drive demand

Traffic’s report states that demand for succulents has existed since the 1990s, but that two key events may have influenced the recent surge: a drought induced by El Niño in 2015-16 and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The El Niño weather patterns triggered low and erratic rainfall throughout the Southern Africa region, which, Prinsloo says, led to higher-than-normal temperatures and a longer drought season. This sparked unexpected demand for domestic plants that do not require much water.

As for Covid, Prinsloo heard the lockdown of 2020 led to a notable shift in the players involved in the succulent trade. Traffic’s report states that before the pandemic, foreign nationals – often from East Asia or Europe – would visit South Africa to remove plants and smuggle them back home. Since they could not travel to the region during the lockdown, they recruited local people to harvest succulents on their behalf.

“The foreign nationals might also have been afraid of the apparent high risk of getting caught as a result of the high presence of law enforcers imposing the pandemic’s restrictions,” she says.

Prinsloo adds that poaching of succulents increased during lockdown because of the economic hardship people experienced at that time. Before the pandemic, the succulents trade was rather informal, but by the time the restrictions were lifted, “it had evolved into an organised crime”.

As a result, the number of succulent plants seized drastically increased in the years following the pandemic, from 58,779 in 2019 to 329,434 in 2021.

Impacts of the trade

Numerous succulent populations in Southern Africa have declined in large numbers and many face near extinction as a result of illegal harvesting, according to Bruwer’s 2023 study.

These rapid declines triggered conservation status assessments, the study highlights. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) then classified several species in the Succulent Karoo biome as critically endangered.

The study adds that illegal succulent harvesting also harms habitats conducive to other plants, reptiles and insects, and that such degraded landscapes become less resilient to climate change shocks.

According to Bruwer, in most communities she spoke with in South Africa, the illegal trade makes people lose “something precious, something rare”.

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