Status symbol: A cycad at the Royal Botanical Gardens in London. Three of South Africa’s cycad species are extinct in the wild with more than half of the 38 species at risk of extinction. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)
The biggest threats to the survival of cycads comes from wealthy people obsessed with owning them and willing to pay large sums to own one of this ancient group of cone-producing plants.
Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime in its latest risk bulletin by the Civil Society Observatory of Illicit Economies in Eastern and Southern Africa, which flags cycad poaching as among four new trends in organised crime.
“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, the plants “are being loved to death”.
“Owning a rare cycad displays wealth and intelligence in a way owning luxury cars does not.’”
One section of the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town is given over to cycads, “a group of plants so ancient that dinosaurs once roamed among them”.
According to the risk bulletin, “Cycads are greatly prized by collectors, and rare specimens can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. This is why the most valuable cycad in Kirstenbosch is now secured inside a cage — to prevent poachers from digging it up.”
This, it said, is not an imagined threat. “Over two rainy nights in August 2014, poachers made off with 24 Encephalartos latifrons cycads from the gardens, collectively worth more than $65 000 [about R1-million]. That particular species of cycad is critically endangered, with fewer than 100 surviving plants in the wild. The incident received international attention, yet dozens like it take place each year.”
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.
With 38 types of cycad, 29 of which are found nowhere else, South Africa is home to about 10% of the world’s total species.
The bulletin notes that three of these species are already extinct in the wild and half of the remaining species are at risk of extinction in the near future.
In 2005, said the risk bulletin, poachers dug up the last 11 survivors of one species on a mountain where, less than 30 years earlier, more than 200 of the plants had been counted.
“The costs are especially pronounced given the global conservation status of cycads, which have been described by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as the most threatened plant group in the world,” it said.
That the plants grow extremely slowly and take decades to reach maturity means many collectors “lack patience” and 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 risk bulletin describes how, of more than 630 cycads confiscated by police in the Eastern Cape between 2011 and 2016, “every single one was on the IUCN red list, demonstrating a clear market preference for threatened species”.
Cycads are also harvested illegally for traditional medicine, “yet the medicinal market is far smaller and less damaging to cycad populations than the horticultural trade”.
“Since the 1970s, it has been prohibited to harvest, trade or possess wild cycads in South Africa, but a legal market still exists for cultivated plants. This provides cover for traffickers and enables the laundering of poached cycads.”
Conservationists recently estimated that Pretoria alone had as many as 36 000 households with cycads, which the bulletin notes “is many times more than officials have capacity to inspect”.
This, said the risk bulletin, is worsened by the “widespread securitisation” of wealthier houses in the country, with many located in gated areas, making access even more difficult for inspectors.
“Conservationists have reported visiting homes with ostensibly cultivated cycads that bore unmistakable traces of wild origins, such as burn marks from fires and bites from porcupines.”
The risk bulletin notes that a major centre of the country’s cycad poaching crisis is in the Eastern Cape, home to 14 native cycad species. “Research by a retired high-ranking police official indicates that, between 2011 and 2018, close to 1 000 cycads were uprooted in 27 separate poaching incidents, with an estimated value of $1.2-million,” it said.
“Police in the small town of Jansenville alone (population 5 600) recorded more than 350 stolen cycads. And these are only poaching incidents that have been reported to the police. Several cycad poachers have been arrested on multiple occasions, including a local farm owner. This suggests that cycad poaching is a specialised market, requiring specialist knowledge of which species are valuable, as well as access to buyers.”
The bulletin said the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions appear not to have had a major effect on the illicit cycad trade. “Informants reported that there were no significant changes in cycad prices. Two cases of cycad theft from private residences were reported in the Eastern Cape during lockdown, while authorities in the neighbouring Western Cape noted a brief decline in cycad poaching, followed by a rapid escalation, with cycads worth approximately $1-million stolen in just six months of 2021.”
The risk bulletin details the various attempts to deter cycad poaching, including implanting microchips and a technique known as micro-dotting but “both methods are time consuming”. Poachers, it said, have developed ways to work around these deterrents, 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. For now, the surest method of keeping wild cycads in the ground appears to be physically enclosing them, an option available mainly to private landowners,” said the risk bulletin.
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