The Million-Rand Black Market in South Africa’s Tiny Desert Plants

The man believed he was meeting a buyer. On a stretch of the N7 near Garies, in South Africa’s Northern Cape, he approached a vehicle and discovered that the people inside were not buyers at all. They were undercover investigators from the Hawks.

He had 2,863 protected Conophytum plants with him. Not diamonds. Not ivory. Small, fleshy, often pebble-shaped succulents — plants that someone unfamiliar with the Karoo might walk past without a second glance.

The arrest took place in December 2022. In April 2025, the Springbok Regional Court sentenced Hanro Owies to eight years’ direct imprisonment for offences involving the illegal transport and trade of protected plants. The National Prosecuting Authority and SAPS publicly recorded the outcome.[3]

That is a remarkable sentence for a cargo that could be mistaken for an ordinary collection of garden plants. But the object of the trade is anything but ordinary. These are organisms evolved to survive in harsh, particular places. Some species occur over such narrow ranges that one destructive collecting episode can damage a substantial fraction of their known population.

South Africa has spent decades discussing what to do with its minerals, its agricultural exports and its comparative advantage. Here is a rather stranger version of the same question: what happens when the commodity is a living thing that cannot simply be manufactured again?

A tiny plant, an enormous scarcity problem

The Succulent Karoo is not the sort of landscape one ordinarily associates with an international luxury market. Its hills and gravel plains stretch through the drier western parts of South Africa and into southern Namibia. Yet it is an extraordinary botanical concentration: CapeNature describes a biome of about 116,000 square kilometres containing roughly 6,400 plant species, with about 40% found nowhere else.[4]

Then there are the Conophytums, commonly called button plants. Their two fused, water-storing leaves can resemble a single smooth bead. Others form little clusters, flower spectacularly in season, or blend into quartz gravel so convincingly that the landscape seems to have produced its own camouflage.

Because suitable habitats can be highly localised, this is not a commodity with a vast, interchangeable supply base. A garment manufacturer can source cotton from another supplier. A collector seeking a particular wild-grown Conophytum cannot replace an extinct population with a shipment from another continent.

According to SANBI's 2022 assessment, 97% of Conophytum species fell into a threatened category, including 45% classified as Critically Endangered. These are assessment results, not a precise count of plants remaining in the wild.[2]

In ordinary economics, scarcity raises prices and attracts new supply. In this market, higher prices may attract people to remove the supply that remains.

The distinction matters. Scarcity is not automatically destructive. Diamonds are scarce partly because distribution is controlled; limited-edition watches are scarce partly because firms decide how many to make. A rare, slow-growing living plant has no such responsive factory. Removing a mature specimen takes the thing out of the reproductive system that might replace it.

Economists have a name for the dangerous version of this: the anthropogenic Allee effect. As a species becomes rarer, its attractiveness to status-driven buyers may increase, raising the incentive to pursue the surviving specimens. The rarity is no longer just a consequence of demand. It becomes part of what creates demand.

A global collecting craze meets a local labour market

Demand has not appeared from nowhere. Specialist enthusiasts in East Asia, Europe and North America have long admired unusual succulents. More recently, online marketplaces, social media and pandemic-era interest in houseplants broadened the audience for rare specimens. TRAFFIC's research describes an illegal trade with a sizeable online component and buyers across several continents.[1]

For the buyer, a miniature plant can function like a collectable: compact enough for an apartment, distinctive enough to photograph, and sufficiently unusual to signal membership of a particular community. For certain buyers, weathered wild growth can matter as much as the species name itself. A decades-old plant may have a character that a greenhouse seedling cannot rapidly reproduce.

Now place that demand alongside the rural economy of Namaqualand. Employment opportunities are uneven; the distances between towns are large; agricultural work can be seasonal; and communities have little control over international resale channels. A cash offer for a day's collecting can be hard to dismiss when formal income is scarce.

That does not make poaching harmless. It does change how we ought to interpret the economics. The person digging a plant from the ground is not necessarily the person setting its final price — or receiving the largest reward. TRAFFIC specifically identifies financial motivation as a leading driver of participation.[1]

There is a familiar structure here. It resembles several resource value chains, legal and illegal: the origin country bears environmental and social costs, while buyers, brokers and distribution networks elsewhere hold the information and access required to sell into premium markets. The crucial difference is that in this case the asset is not renewable on a human commercial timetable.

The money is not necessarily where the plants are

Following a rare succulent from the Karoo to an overseas collector reveals an uncomfortable economic imbalance. The people closest to the resource often have the least bargaining power, while those controlling international distribution and access to buyers may capture much greater value. Precise profits are difficult to establish: illicit transactions are poorly documented, and advertised auction prices do not necessarily represent completed sales.

Still, the economic mechanism is worth exploring. Imagine a plant acquired at source for R30 and eventually offered for R3,000. That is a 100-fold difference in price, but it is not evidence of a 9,900% net profit margin. Transport, losses, intermediaries, risk, taxes where applicable and unsuccessful transactions all complicate the calculation.

More importantly, the hypothetical exposes a bargaining problem: the local person with physical access to a rare resource may know almost nothing about the eventual buyer's willingness to pay. The person with the customer relationship and international distribution channel may possess far more pricing power.

A financial crime with a botanical disguise

The second surprising part of this story is where it intersects with the banking system. Rare succulents are physical objects, but international trade ultimately needs money to move. That leaves a financial trail — imperfect, fragmented, but potentially useful to investigators.

In a November 2025 publication, South Africa's Financial Intelligence Centre analysed financial intelligence linked to succulent poaching covering January 2020 to September 2024. It referred to 353 regulatory reports from accountable institutions. The report count increased from 81 in 2020 to 160 in January–September 2024. These were reports, not confirmed crimes, not convicted people, and not a direct measure of the number of plants taken.[5]

Nonetheless, it is a material piece of evidence. A conservation problem is entering the same analytical world as other illicit-market investigations: suspicious transaction patterns, movement of proceeds, intermediary accounts and the challenge of distinguishing legitimate trade from criminal activity. A suspicious payment alone cannot establish plant poaching; combined with permits, shipments and field intelligence, it can form part of the evidential picture.

There is an uncomfortable lesson here for anyone who thinks these are simply small, isolated offences. TRAFFIC has documented more than 1.6 million seized plants from over 650 species between 2019 and May 2024.[1] Those seizures establish a severe conservation and enforcement problem. They do not establish the total size of the black market in rands. To calculate that honestly, we would need much better information about undetected volumes and actual sale prices.

More confiscations can mean more trafficking, better policing, or both. A decline in seizures does not necessarily mean trafficking has fallen. It may reflect stronger deterrence, weaker enforcement, altered smuggling routes or changes in reporting. Seizure statistics therefore reveal only part of the market.

Confiscated does not mean rescued

Suppose the authorities intercept a shipment. In a conventional smuggling case, seizure may largely finish the immediate task: the contraband is detained, evidence is preserved and a prosecution can proceed. With a succulent, the object of the prosecution is still alive. It needs watering, climate-appropriate care, disease control and sometimes years of accommodation.

That is an expensive problem for botanical gardens already operating under constrained budgets. TRAFFIC notes the processing burden on conservation facilities, and Kew reports that intercepted plants often cannot simply be returned to wild populations.[6] A precise place of origin may be unknown. Conditions may not suit the plant once reintroduced. Movement between populations can also introduce disease or compromise conservation work.

But this is not a uniformly hopeless story. SANBI's 2024/25 annual report documents both serious losses in some collections and improved outcomes elsewhere, including over 11,900 individuals relocated to more suitable facilities and the successful reintroduction of Conophytum ficiforme on private land. It is an important corrective to the idea that every confiscated plant is destined to die.[7]

The economic point is easily missed: a criminal seizure can transfer long-term biological care costs from the trafficker to the state and conservation institutions. That cost does not appear in a sensational retail valuation of the confiscated shipment, but someone still has to pay it.

Could South Africa build a legal industry instead?

At first glance, the answer seems straightforward: grow the plants here, certify their origins and sell them lawfully to the same collectors. South Africa has the ecological know-how, the biodiversity, and communities in regions where additional income and employment would matter. The solution appears to be to replace illegal extraction with legitimate cultivation.

There is merit in that argument. Seed-grown plants can service hobbyists who want the species rather than a particular wild specimen. Credible provenance and legal export pathways might create business opportunities around propagation, conservation horticulture, specialist nurseries and export services. SANBI's 2024/25 reporting says it is working to develop a nursery network for legal trade and explore revenue models that could also support conservation.[7]

But legal cultivation has two serious limits.

The first is time. A seedling produced under controlled conditions may be saleable as a young plant, but it is not instantly a decades-old wild-grown specimen. The very characteristics that some specialist collectors prize can be difficult to reproduce quickly.

The second is substitution. More legal plants only displace illegal demand if enough buyers regard them as acceptable alternatives. If a wealthy collector specifically wants the appearance and provenance of an old wild specimen, legal propagation could expand a parallel market while doing little to extinguish the destructive premium.

That suggests the proper policy question is not simply, “Can South Africa grow succulents?” It is: which part of the international demand curve can legal cultivation realistically serve — and can it do so while materially improving local livelihoods?

The model makes the opportunity and the problem visible at the same time. A nursery producing 50,000 saleable units at R150 would record R7.5 million in revenue if every plant sold. But 50,000 produced is not necessarily 50,000 sold. There may be mortality, slow-moving stock, quality variation, permit costs and collectors unwilling to pay the assumed price. The model's operating surplus is not accounting profit or cash flow: it excludes investment, financing and other items that affect those measures.

So the most credible near-term strategy is probably more modest than a grand new national succulent-export industry. It may involve community nurseries focused first on demonstrably marketable species; conservation partnerships to secure legal seed stock; buyers willing to commit to traceable purchases; and an export process that rewards legitimate businesses instead of burying them in cost.

South Africa also has a regulatory lever. In February 2023, South Africa's request to include the Conophytum genus and other specified succulents in CITES Appendix III took effect. That helps authorities scrutinise cross-border trade with documentation requirements. It does not, by itself, eliminate illicit demand or resolve the challenge of identifying hundreds of similar-looking plant taxa.[8]

For enforcement, financial intelligence, customs screening, field conservation and online-marketplace interventions all have roles. For legitimate business, the relevant building blocks are provenance, buyer trust and predictable compliance. One side reduces the payoff to theft; the other improves the payoff to conservation.