Huge rise in illegal plant harvesting sows concern
ON A tour inside a confidential facility where thousands of decades-old confiscated succulents are being held, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-SA), Cape Nature and the SA National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) shone a spotlight on the catastrophic rise in illegal harvesting of plants across the Succulent Karoo region.
According to Sanbi, confiscated plants in their facilities have increased annually by more than 20% over the past four years with 650 different species and over 1.2 million wild harvested plants seized by police and law enforcement up to this month.
It is suspected that less than 25% of the illegal plant trade is intercepted by law enforcement and that over 1.5 million plants have been removed from the wild in the past three years.
Carina Becker du Toit, the scientific co-ordinator for plant poaching at Sanbi, said: “We are at one of a number of Sanbi facilities that are housing confiscated poached plants. We are located within the Succulent Karoo because our climate is more suited to housing the plants that come from these arid areas, as opposed to other facilities in the country. The bulk of our cases are coming in from the Northern Cape but we also get cases from the Western Cape as well.”
On average, this facility receives anywhere between three to seven cases a week, with anywhere between 1 000 to 10 000 plants per case. These escalating numbers are putting extreme strain on Sanbi’s resources to be able to house the plants as they needed soil, trays, watering and manpower to count the plants, photograph them, and identify them for law enforcement.
Becker du Toit said: “The problem we have now is that these plants are being poached at such an alarming rate, that we are actually struggling to keep up with updating their population numbers.
“When these plants arrive, we support law enforcement with giving statements and key information about plant numbers, their age, and what value they have in the ecosystem … We then basically triage the plants and see which ones we can save and which ones we have to let go,” she said.
Some of these plants are from the Conophytum genus, the main genus targeted through plant poaching, and some others that are in high demand in the international horticultural trade as collectors’ items – the more unique, rare or funky looking they are, the more they are desired by international markets.
Police and law enforcement have been confiscating these plants from the illegal trade on highways, on trucks and cars, at road blocks, at OR Tambo Airport (where they are seized through customs), and even through spotting people in the veld with bags and tools.
The organisations appealed to the public to keep a look out for plants that are being sold or trafficked illegally and advised that a simple way the public could assist was by verifying where the plants being sold on the side of the road or at markets were sourced from and acquired.
WWF-SA Succulent Karoo project co-ordinator Katherine Forsythe said this dramatic and catastrophic increase in illegal harvesting of succulent plants has been endangering the high levels of diversity and endemism of species within the Succulent Karoo Biome, a global biodiversity hot spot.