Posted by Endless expanses of rugged terrain stretch before me, dotted with succulents in every conceivable shape. I’m near Nieuwoudtville, in the Northern Cape, in a town named after my forefathers, which for so many years was just a family name on a map. The Karoo is succulent central. Many of these plants grow so slowly that they take years or even decades to mature, and some are more than 50 years old.
Looking out over this dry, empty country, it is hard to believe that it is a crime scene. Rare succulents are being dug up, sometimes in broad daylight, one plant at a time. One plant at a time does not sound like much, but it adds up. Whole patches of hillside have been cleared, and some species no longer exist in the wild.
Source: Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund
More than a place to drive through
Many South Africans know the Karoo only as the long stretch you drive through on the way from Gauteng to the Cape. Yet the Succulent Karoo, which runs from southern Namibia into the Northern and Western Cape, holds one of the richest collections of succulents on earth: some 6,000 species, about 40% of them found nowhere else. Heat and drought have produced plants of every shape and size, from Aloes to the tiny Lithops and Conophytums that look like pebbles.
That is also what makes them popular as houseplants. They are small, striking, easy to care for and tough enough to survive weeks in transit. Demand surged during the Covid-19 lockdowns, driven by social media and the fashion for low-maintenance indoor plants, and poachers followed.
The scale of the trade
The numbers have kept climbing since I first wrote about this. TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, found that more than 1.6 million illegally harvested succulents from over 650 species were seized in South Africa between 2019 and May 2024. Seizures jumped from about 59,000 plants in 2019 to more than 329,000 in 2021.
In April 2026, CapeNature told the Western Cape legislature that around 2.5 million poached succulents had been seized in the province alone since 2018, and that this was probably less than a quarter of what has been taken. In the first half of 2026, nearly 376,000 plants were seized in just 26 incidents. Flora crime now makes up more than half of CapeNature’s investigations.
Some species have already been lost. Seven Conophytum species and two subspecies have become functionally extinct in the wild since 2020, among them Conophytum youngii, C. pium and C. bachelorum.
The syndicates have also moved on to other plants. Conophytums were the first target, but poachers now go after Euphorbias, Gibbaeum, the elephant’s foot (Dioscorea elephantipes) and, most recently, the rare Clivia mirabilis.
How the supply chain works
The trade runs through several hands, and each one takes a bigger cut than the last.
It starts with local harvesters, recruited by middlemen working for organised syndicates. Before the pandemic, foreign collectors from China, South Korea, Japan and Europe often came to dig up plants themselves. When Covid closed the borders, the syndicates switched to South African-based middlemen, mostly linked to Chinese networks, who recruit locals to collect specific species to order. The harvesters know the terrain and often work in remote areas or at night. They are paid between R10 and R150 a plant. Overseas, the same plant can sell for many times that.
The plants are then moved, hidden in vehicles, from the Northern Cape to Cape Town and other cities. There they are cleaned, dried and packed to survive a journey that can take weeks. They leave the country disguised as legal goods, mixed in with legitimate plant shipments or posted in small parcels, sometimes with forged permits. Some are routed through other African countries, including Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania, to hide their origin.
The main markets are China, South Korea and Japan, along with Europe, especially Germany, and North America. One South Korean national, dubbed the world’s most notorious succulent thief, was arrested in Cape Town with some 60,000 Conophytums, some of them hundreds of years old.
At the end of the chain, the plants are sold to collectors through social media, online marketplaces and specialist plant sites, often at very high prices. Instagram has helped push up demand, and on sites where anyone can sell, illegal plants are easy to hide among legal ones. eBay has worked with TRAFFIC and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to find and remove illegal plant listings, but the volume of online trade makes it hard to keep up. Many buyers have no idea their plant was dug up from a Karoo hillside.
Why enforcement struggles
Dr Carina Bruwer of ENACT has pointed to several weaknesses in South Africa’s response. Police and conservation agencies lack people and money, and they are swamped by the sheer number of confiscated plants, more than 3,000 a week, which have to be kept alive as evidence. There are allegations of corruption, particularly in the Northern Cape, where most poaching happens but where enforcement capacity is weakest. National and provincial environmental laws do not line up neatly, which creates gaps. And while the trade is transnational, the response is still largely domestic.
The courts are starting to act. In 2025 a 24-year-old Northern Cape man was sentenced to eight years in prison for possessing nearly 3,000 protected succulents, and four people were convicted for poaching Clivia mirabilis. But conviction rates have historically been low and sentences light, so few poachers are deterred.
At the international level, South Africa won support at the CITES conference in Samarkand in December 2025 to move two dwarf succulents, Avonia quinaria and Euphorbia bupleurifolia, to Appendix I, which bans commercial trade in wild-collected plants.
The cost to the Karoo
Succulents hold the Karoo together. They feed and shelter insects and animals, hold the thin soil in place and help the land get through droughts. Take out enough of them and the veld becomes poorer and less able to cope with a changing climate.
People who live there pay too. Communities that could earn a living from tourism or a legal plant trade lose out to syndicates that strip the hillsides for quick money. Conservation agencies spend scarce money housing confiscated plants rather than protecting habitats.
What needs to happen
South Africa already has a plan. In 2022 the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, SANBI, WWF, TRAFFIC and other partners launched the National Response Strategy and Action Plan to Address the Illegal Trade in South African Succulent Flora. It covers field monitoring, enforcement, legislation, research, community development, awareness and the propagation of plants outside the wild.
The problem is putting it into practice. What is needed most is more rangers and investigators in the Northern Cape, better facilities to keep seized plants alive, biodiversity crime training for police, prosecutors and magistrates, and tougher sentences. South Africa also needs help from the countries the plants pass through and end up in, and from online sellers willing to look for illegal listings.
Enforcement alone will not do it. A legal trade in nursery-grown succulents, with clear certificates, would give buyers an honest option and give Karoo communities a reason to protect the plants instead of digging them up. And buyers can help by asking where a plant came from before they pay for it.
What struck me in the Karoo is how far the network reaches. It is not only foreign buyers and big-city syndicates. Many of the middlemen seem to be locals, in on it even in the smaller towns, which makes the trade much harder to root out.
Out here it is easy to think the Karoo is too big and too empty to lose anything. But some of its smallest plants are already gone from the wild, taken one at a time by a supply chain that ends on someone’s windowsill on the other side of the world.
First published in February 2025. Updated November 2026.
