Social media houseplant craze blamed for devastating succulent poaching across Africa

A houseplant craze on social media and Asian collectors are driving a devastating wave of illegal succulent poaching across Africa, threatening rare plant species with extinction in the wild.

Botanists claim South Africans and Kenyans are being exploited by foreign criminals to dig up hundreds of rare African species to supply voracious Asian, European and North American demand.

“The Asian market for these plants is insatiable. It is gigantic,” said Dr Cornelia Klak, from the department of biological sciences at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

“There is a collecting mania. People want these wild plants which can grow for up to a hundred years. They are being taken out by local people, some of whom have lost jobs throughout lockdown. 

“They are cleaning out the populations, including all the very, very old plants. This is the tragedy; they are not just picking off the seeds.”

Experts said that the plant smugglers, primarily from China and South Korea, scout out rare plant locations on the continent before paying locals low wages to dig them up before shipping them to Asia. Often the plants are fed into the international market through major hubs such as Amsterdam, they said.

A well-established garden centre owner in Nairobi, Kenya, said that they had heard of helicopters being rented out by criminals to get to some of the rarer species on mountain slopes.

Another researcher, who asked not to be named, worked recently with Chinese funders to document East Africa’s flora. The researcher claimed that when they finally shared the results of the survey with their funders, some of the rarer plants suddenly disappeared.

While the trade is not just limited to succulents, the fleshy plants are considered highly desirable. They have adapted to survive with minimal water and almost no humidity, making them perfect house plants.

Demand for succulents boomed during 2020, as hundreds of millions of people worldwide were stuck at home. Some UK plant retailers have seen as much as a 500 per cent increase in sales since the start of the pandemic, with millennials thought to be leading the charge. There are tens of millions of results on the photo-sharing application Instagram tagged with hashtags like “plantsofinstagram”, “succulents” and “plantsmakepeoplehappy”.

“I think succulent plant poaching is quite rampant [in Kenya]. They are ornamental things and people like to grow them in gardens and houses,” said Dr Emily Wabuyele of Kenyatta University in Nairobi.

“When you look through the international catalogues you will find a lot of Kenyan plants. They are disguised as vegetables and taken out of the country. If a succulent has any medical qualities they’re even more at risk,” she added.

The situation is worse in South Africa, which is home to about a third of all the succulent species. Authorities there are battling to stop the surge before it deals irreversible damage to the country’s biodiversity and are being overwhelmed by tens of thousands of seizures.

Earlier this year, a court in Cape Town handed two South Koreans a £250,000 fine and a six-year suspended prison sentence for the illegal possession of 60,000 Conophytum plants, a genus of flowering succulents native to western South Africa and Namibia.

“It is illegal. They are crooks. They are destroying our wildlife,” said Mike Sherman, one of Johannesburg’s best-known plant experts. “Permits are needed for this kind of trade. It can all be done legally. But those who sell to collectors are thieves – they will pay anything to have the whole set of one species.”