Poaching for the horticultural market is threatening cycads in SA says the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime

Pictured is a Roboguard Early Warning System looking after the cycad garden. Brazen thieves have stolen at least 23 of the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens' world-famous critically endangered cycads. File Picture: David Ritchie

Pictured is a Roboguard Early Warning System looking after the cycad garden. Brazen thieves have stolen at least 23 of the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens' world-famous critically endangered cycads. File Picture: David Ritchie

Published Dec 22, 2021

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DURBAN - The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC), in its Risk Bulletin issue 22, Observatory of Illicit Economies in Eastern and Southern Africa, has revealed that poaching for the horticultural market is threatening cycads in South Africa.

“In South Africa, a hotspot of cycad diversity, this demand has given rise to a harmful illicit market that has placed dozens of species at risk,” the GI-TOC said.

The existence of a legal cycad market enables poachers to launder their harvests. “Many homes could have cycads purchased from traffickers, and no one would know,” one cycad expert said.

“The illicit cycad trade in South Africa has grown so organised, lucrative and harmful that the authorities have identified it as a priority wildlife crime, alongside rhino, elephant and abalone poaching,” the GI-TOC said.

It said South Africa is a hotspot of cycad diversity, hosting 38 species, or around a tenth of the world’s total. Of these species, 29 are endemic, found nowhere else on earth. Already, three of South Africa’s cycads are extinct in the wild, and half of the remaining species are at risk of extinction in the near future, according to scientists.

Cycads are considered status symbols by wealthy collectors in South Africa and internationally: as one participant said to researchers studying the trade in South Africa, ‘owning a rare cycad displays wealth and intelligence in a way owning luxury cars does not’.

“But the plants grow extremely slowly – around a centimetre per year – and take decades to reach maturity. Lacking patience, many collectors prefer to buy fully grown cycads, driving the illicit market. This illicit trade has operated for decades in South Africa, but may have intensified in recent years as the plants become rarer in the wild, and thus more coveted,” the GI-TOC said.

The GI-TOC said cycads are also harvested illegally in South Africa for producing traditional medicine.

Conservationists recently estimated that, in Pretoria alone, there were as many as 36 000 households with cycads – many times more than officials have the capacity to inspect.

The GI-TOC quoted South African National Biodiversity Institute cycad expert John Donaldson who said: “Many homes could have cycads purchased from traffickers and no one would know”.

The GI-TOC said cycads are typically priced per centimetre, with rarer species considered more valuable; other factors that influence the cost of cycads include age and signs of damage.

“The Covid-19 pandemic, which restricted passenger flights and interprovincial travel for more than six months in 2020, appears not to have had a major effect on the illicit cycad trade,” the GI-TOC said.

It said various attempts had been made to deter cycad poaching, including implanting microchips and a technique known as micro-dotting or spraying the plants with minuscule dots, each of which has a reference code unique to each plant that can be scanned. But both methods are time-consuming, requiring individual plants to be tagged in the wild, and poachers have developed workarounds, such as x-raying plants and digging out the microchips.

Researchers from the University of Cape Town have now developed a promising technique for identifying wild cycads using radiocarbon dating and stable isotopes, which act as hyper-local signatures of the landscape where individual cycads grew. These signatures are intrinsic to each plant and cannot be removed. The primary application of this method, however, is in detecting cycads that have already been poached, not preventing poaching in the first place.

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