The Rise of Plant Poaching: How a Craze for Succulents is Driving a New Illegal Trade
January 29, 2025 at 01:19AMEasily transported and highly coveted by plant collectors, ornamental succulents are now being poached across South Africa’s Northern Cape. Demand for these east Asian status symbols has skyrocketed, to the point where 45 percent of known species are on the brink of extinction, destroying fragile interdependencies between plants, and causing ecological disaster. The situation has become so dire that scientists are refusing to honor the standard practice of naming new species by their discovery location—all to evade thieves.
Over the few days we spent together last year, the shopkeeper told me a story that was, on the surface, a tale about a petty, small-town feud. But in its own wild, deeply personal and convoluted way, the tale aligned with what half a dozen experts later told me about cono poaching, a trade that is literally changing the face of the earth. It showed what happens when the quest to save a species comes up against the realities of life in a country where one in three people are unemployed. And it revealed an obscene truth about the triviality of our present moment: that a whole ecosystem can be under threat simply because of an internet craze for a trippy-looking plant.
The pandemic turbocharged the trade. Millions of people all over the world, stuck at home, took up an interest in both online shopping and collecting houseplants, posting the more exotic ones on social media sites. Foreign collectors who could no longer travel found an easy, if exploitative solution. They started recruiting locals to harvest the plants. For desperate people in South Africa, where the economy took a severe knock during Covid, this was a boon. By the end of 2021, conservationists had confiscated more than 300,000 succulents, but they estimated this was only one-quarter of the total harvested by traffickers.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/28/the-rise-of-plant-poaching-how-a-craze-for-succulents-is-driving-a-new-illegal-trade/
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