Image of Lithops salicola from Wikimedia Commons
In part one of our new mini-series focusing mainly on plant trafficking, we looked at the seriousness and the extent of the problem, which affects South Africa too, and the role that social media plays in enabling it. In this second part we take a high-level look at the methods used by traffickers, and the international response to this growing crime.
Many people may be tempted to place less importance of the theft and trafficking of plants than they would on, say, the poaching of rhino horn. But it’s not just the plants themselves that are threatened by these crimes. For one thing, animal life itself – including humans – would not exist without plants.
The impact of plant poaching is far-reaching, notes the new research report published by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s (GI-TOC) ECO-SOLVE programme. This initiative is designed to monitor the illicit online environmental trade, extract data that can be passed on to law enforcement agencies for their use and benefit, and promote greater transparency and accountability in tackling illicit online markets.
Plants play anchoring roles in sectors such as tourism and conservation, ecology, traditional medicine and pharmaceuticals, food and nutrition, and others. They are also critical in ecosystems, “maintaining soil stability, providing food and shelter for wildlife, and contributing to the overall ecological balance. The removal of rare and endemic species from their natural habitats can lead to population declines and extinction in the wild.”
The removal of flora undermines conservation efforts and ecotourism, on which many local communities rely for their livelihoods, says the report. There is also an economic impact, as illegal harvesting deprives regions of potential revenue from sustainable legal trade in those items, while it floods markets with illegally sourced products that undercut legal, regulated products.
“Cultural and medicinal practices tied to these plants are also jeopardised as species vanish from their native landscapes.”
Tricks of the trade
The illegal plant trade has increasingly moved online, says ECO-SOLVE. As noted in part one of this mini-series, digital platforms facilitate all stages of the supply chain, from poaching to consumer sales.
Leads for rare and unusual specimens are generated from various sources including biodiversity websites, online plant forums, and social media platforms.
“Unlike fauna, plant specimens remain in place in the wild, making them easier to collect. Photos uploaded by plant enthusiasts or researchers, particularly those with precise locations, provide the information needed to locate plants in the wild. Criminal networks use this information to identify target areas for poaching.”
Traffickers can either collect the plants themselves if they live in the area or have access to a temporary abode such as a guesthouse, or they can persuade people in the source countries to provide the required items.
Poverty plays a significant role in the latter situation, where desperate people take on illegal jobs in return for a payment. Also, “social pressure exists to join gangs, and gang members’ lifestyles become aspirational,” says the South African Money Laundering Integrated Task Force (Samlit), in its 2021 report, Financial Flows Associated with Illegal Wildlife Trade in South Africa. The organisation was established in 2019 by the Financial Intelligence Centre as a public-private partnership between the banking sector and sector regulatory authorities.
“These individuals tend to operate within the reserves and are solicited to assist in sourcing products. Syndicates have been known to offer loans to poachers for their families, luring them in and allowing them to accumulate debt to sustain their loyalty,” Samlit adds.
Once harvested, the ECO-SOLVE report says, the plants are marketed online “through social media platforms, e-commerce websites, and specialised forums”.
The report cites the case of a Spanish couple who were apprehended in South Africa following a poaching expedition in that country and Namibia in 2015. Authorities seized more than 2 000 succulents, also finding evidence that many more plants had already been sent to Spain. The couple sold the poached plants through an e-commerce website and offered international shipping, “taking advantage of the ease with which poached plants can be transported using commercial parcel carriers”.
In the decade since, succulent poaching has gone from an occasional incident to an ecological crisis. As a precaution, the South African National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) is collecting specimens of the rarest and most threatened species, so that if they become extinct in the wild there will at least be some cultivated plants to keep the species alive.
Profits from plant trafficking are laundered through cash withdrawals, point of sale purchases, casino credits, Western Union and MoneyGram transactions, forex transactions, and real time transfers, as well as mobile money and informal financial systems such as bartering, says the Samlit report, which provides information relating to the inflow and outflow of money used or earned in IWT related to South Africa.
The plants themselves are smuggled out of South Africa through Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport or Cape Town International Airport, as well as border crossings into Mozambique and Namibia – often concealed among other goods, or simply declared incorrectly. “More creative smuggling methods are also often used, including disguising plants as everyday items by wrapping them in toilet paper or labelling them as children’s toys. In one case, 12 000 succulents were disguised as mushrooms for shipment to China.”
International response
The increasingly online nature of these crimes adds unique challenges for law enforcement authorities, while corruption is an extra complicating factor. There has been some progress in recent years, but the complexity of the problem requires a “multifaceted approach and a combination of regulatory, enforcement, technological innovation, and community-based measures”.
Because digital platforms allow anonymity for those who seek it, buyers and sellers can be hard to trace and track. “The vastness of the internet also overwhelms enforcement efforts, as new listings can be posted faster than they can be detected and removed. The volume of legitimate online plant trade further complicates the issue, requiring great effort and expertise to identify illegal listings, even more so than with fauna.”
But the very same platforms that are used to perpetuate IWT can be used to counter it, by educating people, highlighting the impact of plant poaching, and encouraging consumers to question the origin of plants they wish to buy and choose sustainable, legally sourced alternatives to wild-collected plants.
Innovative monitoring tools, seamless cross-border collaboration, and partnerships with tech companies are all needed to disrupt the online plant trade effectively, says ECO-SOLVE. Authorities must be well capacitated and equipped to stay abreast of the increasingly sophisticated plant trafficking networks. Legislation must be beefed up to eliminate regulatory blind spots, and there must be more robust collaboration among governments, NGOs, and the private sector.
Despite these challenges, some countries are responding proactively. For instance, South Africa has developed the National Response Strategy and Action Plan to Address the Illegal Trade in South African Succulent Flora – an initiative of Sanbi and the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment – as well as the National Integrated Strategy to Combat Wildlife Trafficking. The former strategy suggests other measures such as collaboration between Sanbi and “suitable and compliant succulent nurseries”, where confiscated flora would be used to propagate succulents for legitimate sale, or joint ventures with overseas nurseries and sellers to supply those markets directly. Such measures would enhance the sustainability of succulent ecosystems while mitigating the demand for the plants.
Namibia’s Protected Plants Task Team, established in 2023, is an inter-agency collaboration between the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism, the police force and the revenue agency.
Other tech responses such as the use of AI for monitoring systems and web-scraping are being used to detect illegal plant listings on e-commerce sites and social media platforms – one of these is FloraGuard, developed by Southampton University and the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, with funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council.
“Policymakers and law enforcement agencies are encouraged to leverage the GMS’s insights to craft targeted interventions and prosecute those involved in this global crime,” says ECO-SOLVE.
