Plants worthy of respect

Cycads have little chance to survive when thieves dig them up to sell them, and when these plants are 5m tall they can be 500 years old

Unlike rhinos, cycads don’t bleed. But they are even more vulnerable to poachers, whose merciless onslaught on these ancient plants is driven by syndicates feeding the habit of illegal collectors. Like rhinos, cycads are part of our SA heritage. Flagship plants, they belong to us all, and it’s our constitutional right to have them protected and preserved.

People who hack them out of the ground, and sell them — as well as those who buy them — are no better than rhino and elephant poachers. Fortunately, the cost of stealing cycads from the wild has just become higher, after a landmark prosecution.

Four men who were caught in a police roadblock outside Jansenville in the Eastern Cape had filled their bakkie so high with cycads that they couldn’t fit the canopy top back and had to tie it on with rope.

Experts identified the plants as Encephalartos lehmannii, the Karoo Cycad.

They soon found the scene of the crime, where a number of cycads, which obviously could not fit into the bakkie, had been left lying around.

Specialist prosecutor Buks Coetzee, who dealt with the case, says one of the accused, Sibusiso Khumalo, is a wellknown cycad thief who had two previous convictions by the Queenstown and Naboomspruit courts, for both of which he had received a suspended sentence.

This time he was jailed for 10 years. The other poachers were sentenced to five years, and the bakkie was forfeited to the state.

Since all four of them had already spent a year in custody awaiting trial, that amounts to a hefty period for stealing plants.

However, these are not just any old plants; they could be many hundreds of years old; and they come from a rapidly dwindling community in a remote area of the Eastern Cape, making them some of the rarest plants in the world.

Poachers simply hack them out, causing serious damage.

Confiscated cycads are replanted in a safer environment, Coetzee says, “but it takes four or five years before you can tell if the plant will survive. Usually it dies — there’s just a 5%10% success rate. It’s simply pointless to take them out.”

He’s talking about plants that would have been sold on to trophy gardeners if the law hadn’t intervened.

Buyers, having paid top rates, often find that their cycads rot and die.

And you can’t even argue to yourself that the one or two special cycads you buy, legally or illegally, won’t make a difference. Consider this: in another of Coetzee’s cases police found a big truck with two shipping containers full of these plants, taken from the land of an Eastern Cape farmer. Investigators found the site where the cycads were poached and discovered 50 more, some of them 4m-5 m tall, already chopped out and ready to be moved. Plants so tall can be over 500 years old. It is doubtful that they would have survived.

Coetzee says the plants, sold in SA or elsewhere, are status symbols, often bought by people duped into thinking the seller has a valid permit.

It is difficult to be certain about the validity of permits for particular plants, he says. A nursery might have a valid permit but can misuse it so that a cycad that has been brought in from the wild and is sold on can appear legitimate.

Despite these obvious risks, the snob value of a cycad is so high that people buy them regardless.

Officials of the Endangered Wildlife Trust say cycads are in danger in all the provinces where they occur: Limpopo, Gauteng, KwaZulu Natal, Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape, and that they are poached to supply both domestic and international markets.

They welcome the stiff sentences passed in the Jansenville case and say they hope other cycad poachers will be jailed for a similarly long time.

If you’re a trophy gardener, I’m here to urge that you don’t use endangered SA plants like cycads. Actually, don’t use any endangered plants, whatever country they come from, not even if they are accompanied by an apparently valid permit.