Durban – A man has been arrested for dealing in specially protected indigenous plants without a permit.
Durban Metro Police Service spokesperson Senior Superintendent Boysie Zungu said that on Tuesday a search warrant operation was executed on a suspect trading in the illegal sale of cycads.
“The identified target served two shallow-cover agents cycads in exchange for trap money. The suspect was arrested and detained at Lamontville police station,” Zungu said.
He said that five cycads costing R200 each were purchased.
He also said that 40 cycads costing R200 each and R1 000 trap money were seized during the search.
In December last year, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC), in its Risk Bulletin issue 22, Observatory of Illicit Economies in Eastern and Southern Africa, revealed that poaching for the horticultural market is threatening cycads in South Africa.
“In South Africa, a hot spot 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 hot spot of cycad diversity, hosting 38 species, or around a tenth of the world’s total. Of these species, 29 are endemic and 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.
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