Tiny plants in plastic pots, each carefully labeled, cram a South African greenhouse. Each is the evidence of at least one crime. These are strange plants without typical stems or leaves. Some look like greenish thumb-tips, others like grapes or rounded stones. Some sprout small, bright flowers. Few are more than an inch tall. I’ve agreed not to disclose this location because the plants, confiscated from poachers and smugglers, are valuable and could be re-stolen by the same criminal networks that first dug them from their natural habitats to traffic overseas.
The plants come from a vast, arid, and thinly populated region that ecologists call the Succulent Karoo biome. It’s about the size of Kentucky and extends from southwestern Namibia into South Africa’s Northern Cape and Western Cape provinces. Most people would consider the Succulent Karoo a desert—it’s certainly hot, especially in summer, and gets very little rain—but it’s bursting with biodiversity.
The region’s vegetation is dominated by succulent plants, many of which take on bizarre, bulbous shapes for camouflage or for conserving water and periodically bloom in vivid yellows, oranges, reds, purples, pinks, or whites. Botanists have recorded about 6,400 species of native plants here, about 2,500 of them found nowhere else—far more than any other arid region of comparable size. The Succulent Karoo also has numerous unique insects and reptiles, including the world’s smallest tortoise species. About 8 percent of the South African part of this biome is formally protected.
From a car window, the Succulent Karoo can appear drab and barren. But get down on your hands and knees, and it transforms into a wonderland of living treasures—a wonderland that has in the last six years become the target of transnational smuggling networks focused on its unique flora. Millions of plants have been illegally dug from this area, resulting in the functional extinction of at least eight species, with hundreds more species being pushed toward the same fate. Hundreds of thousands of confiscated plants languish in greenhouses across South Africa. Despite the efforts of dedicated conservationists, solutions to South Africa’s plant poaching crisis remain elusive.
Interest in keeping southern Africa’s succulent plants isn’t new. Collectors from around the world have been digging up relatively small numbers of specimens here for as long as anyone can remember. By the mid-20th century, a few local nurseries were propagating and selling a wide variety of Succulent Karoo species, finding buyers both at home and abroad, particularly in the United States, Europe, and various East Asian countries. But nursery owners say the market began to change dramatically about 10 years ago.
“In 2014-2015, we experienced a big increase in demand from East Asia,” says Christine Wiese of Kokerboom Nursery, a long-established producer of succulent seed in the region. This was driven by young people who learned about the plants on the internet, she says, and soon she had a steady stream of visitors from South Korea, China, and Japan. “They were very knowledgeable,” she says. “They really wanted to see the plants in their natural form, and in the wild.” Many legally bought seed to take back to their home countries. Another nursery owner, who has been threatened by smugglers and asked not to be named, says buyers were particularly interested in “small, exceptional, and rare” plants, including some in the genus Lithops but particularly those in the genus Conophytum. (Lithops are called “living stones” because many look like small pebbles. Conophytum species often go by “dumplings,” “button plants,” or simply “conos.”) It’s possible to keep a large selection of these in a very small area, which suits people who live in apartments.
But in 2018, demand for seeds dropped off because foreign buyers, particularly in Asia, suddenly wanted very large numbers of mature plants, which, because they take between four and seven years to grow to a saleable size from seed, South African nurseries could not supply. And that’s when trouble in the Succulent Karoo began.
In 2019, South African law enforcement officers began interdicting unprecedented volumes of succulents that had been illegally harvested from the wild—sometimes thousands of plants at a time. They were found in vehicles at roadblocks, in courier company facilities, in homes, and warehouses. Most were Conophytum, of which there are nearly 200 known species and subspecies.
The situation worsened in 2020 with the onset of the COVID pandemic. Millions of people confined to their homes discovered social media “plantfluencers” who promoted houseplants, including many South African species. Chinese plantfluencers, in particular, drove a craze for conos, some of which were selling for hundreds of dollars apiece. (Conophytums are typically very slow-growing, and plants of some species can live to be centuries old, albeit still small in size.) Many residents of the Succulent Karoo who had lost their jobs as businesses shut down because of the pandemic now turned to illegally collecting plants, then selling them to the agents of transnational criminal organizations, according to Annette Hübschle, chief research officer of the Global Risk Governance program at the University of Cape Town law faculty.
Hübschle said that the Northern Cape province, from which most interdicted succulents were taken, “is a bit like frontier country.” The area already had criminal networks to move diamonds and other illicit commodities, and they easily accommodated succulent plants.
The vast size of the Succulent Karoo and the small number of law enforcement officers who patrolled it made poaching very difficult to control. Enforcement is also complicated because South African conservation laws do not always align from province to province and between the provincial and national levels, said Carina Bruwer, an organized crime researcher with South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies. Possession of a particular species may be illegal in one province but not another, or it might be illegal to collect but legal to possess.
Nonetheless, some enforcement teams had success, most prominently the local Stock Theft and Endangered Species Unit of the South African Police Service in the small town of Springbok, in the heart of the Northern Cape. That unit seized huge numbers of plants in roadblocks and via targeted raids and sting operations, and it arrested hundreds of poachers, most of them small operators.
Confiscated succulents poured into South African botanic gardens, sometimes tens of thousands of plants per week. They had to be kept alive as evidence in criminal cases, and they needed expert care because many were in poor condition or required particular soil and climate requirements. Garden staff told Yale Environment 360 that they soon became overwhelmed—they often did not have the funds for enough pots and soil, enough space, or enough time to nurture the plants. By May of 2024, more than 1.16 million plants from more than 650 species had been seized, over 80 percent of which were conophytums. (The majority have since died, although some facilities have had good success in keeping plants alive.)
Most seized succulents can’t easily be replanted in the wild: Their places of origin are unknown; they might transfer diseases from greenhouses to the wild; and their physiologies have become accustomed to the “soft” greenhouse environment, so they’ll die if returned to the desert. And, of course, they would still be vulnerable to poaching.
“There have been two attempts at relocating populations of poached succulents back to their natural habitats,” a succulent expert who helped with the relocations but is not authorized to speak to the media told Yale Environment 360. “The plants actually survived fairly well, but both populations have been hit by poachers again.”
It’s impossible to estimate accurately how many plants have been trafficked from South Africa since 2019; the number can’t be easily extrapolated from seizure statistics. But thousands of plant populations have been impacted, with as-yet unknown effects on ecosystems. Because of poaching, at least eight species of Conophytum are now considered “functionally extinct,” which means that a tiny number may still survive in the wild, but there are too few to sustain the species’ population or fulfill their previous role in their ecosystem. All Conophytum species have been reclassified in higher IUCN Red List threat categories since 2019.
Despite extraordinary efforts by conservationists, academics, and law enforcement officers to protect succulents, there are no ready solutions to South Africa’s plant poaching problem. One reason, experts say, is that markets for particular plants can shift rapidly and are often poorly understood. Protection policies are often formulated on the basis of unsupported assumptions or too little data and implemented too late, after consumer demand and poaching has risen to harmful levels. Legal growers often can’t react to increased market demand in time, particularly for slow-growing species.
Recently, South Africa appears to have experienced a change in demand for some poached plant species, though evidence is incomplete, and the reasons for the apparent change aren’t completely clear yet. During 2023, there was a reduction in local seizures of poached Conophytum plants, and during 2024, Conophytum seizures almost ceased. A succulent expert who monitors Asian online markets says that prices for some Conophytum species have collapsed. Some observers think the Conophytum craze has passed: Chinese growers now appear to be producing large numbers, possibly replacing wild-sourced plants in that market.
Does this mean that South Africa’s plant poaching crisis is over? Probably not, say experts.
Karel Du Toit, the police officer who led the highly successful Stock Theft and Endangered Species Unit in Springbok, was arrested by South Africa’s national Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation in May of 2024 on what some conservationists and researchers say are trumped-up charges of fraud. He was suspended and then fired, and now his former unit has turned its focus away from plants, so the lack of Conophytum seizures may indicate a lack of law enforcement rather than the absence of trafficking.
Carl Brown, a biodiversity law enforcement officer in the Western Cape Province, says that as Conophytum seizures by his unit have declined in the last year, seizures of rare bulb plants, especially a species named Clivia mirabilis, have skyrocketed. (Other sources say that Clivia mirabilis has recently been almost completely wiped out of its small natural habitat by poachers.)
In addition to its eye-popping range of succulent types, South Africa also has the world’s largest diversity of geophytes, plants with underground nutrient storage organs like bulbs or rhizomes. Over 2,000 geophyte species grow in the Succulent Karoo and the adjacent Fynbos biome, and many are rare, have beautiful flowers, and—just like conophytums—take many years to mature. It’s possible, says Brown, that plant poachers are responding to changing buyer tastes and shifting their attention to different targets. Given South Africa’s extraordinary botanical richness, they have many options for years to come.