The criminal networks that built their fortunes smuggling ivory and rhino horn have found a new product: succulents.
In the remote Succulent Karoo, a vast arid expanse spanning South Africa's Northern and Western Cape provinces into Namibia, some of the most extraordinary plants on earth have spent millions of years adapting to survive where almost nothing else can. They are small, fantastically shaped, and in many cases found nowhere else on the planet. They are also disappearing at a pace that has begun to alarm botanists who rarely sound emergency sirens. Between 2019 and May 2024, South African law enforcement seized more than 1.6 million illegally harvested succulents representing roughly 650 species, according to TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network. That figure covers only what was caught. The actual removal from the wild is likely far greater.
There is a metric that conservation professionals cite to capture just how badly the plant trafficking crisis has been overlooked. According to Botanic Gardens Conservation International, more plant species are currently considered threatened by international trade than animal species. That figure inverts the public conversation entirely: while governments convene summits on ivory and pangolin scales, the plant kingdom is quietly losing more ground, faster, with almost none of the political heat.
The illegal succulent trade is a concentrated example of that failure. The Succulent Karoo is the world's most biodiverse arid region, covering roughly 116,000 square kilometres and housing the planet's largest concentration of succulent species. Around 40 percent of those species are endemic, growing only on specific rocky outcrops or dry hillsides in this part of the world and nowhere else. Since 2022, 85 percent of Conophytum species, the most heavily poached genus, have been listed as either endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. At least 11 succulent species have been driven to functional extinction in the wild by illegal harvesting. Multiple others are now classified as critically endangered, one category from gone entirely.
The rate of confiscation tells its own story. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of plants seized by South African law enforcement increased by more than 200 percent, according to CapeNature, the Western Cape conservation authority. At peak activity, confiscated plants were arriving at processing warehouses at a rate exceeding 3,000 specimens per week.
The criminal infrastructure behind the trade did not build itself from scratch for plants. Carl Brown, an enforcement officer with CapeNature, has described the same Chinese syndicates that ran abalone and rhino-horn smuggling routes in South Africa as having pivoted to succulents. The overlap is not incidental: the logistics are compatible, the export infrastructure already exists, and the profit margins are substantial without the reputational risk of trafficking a charismatic megafauna.
Shipments travel through Johannesburg's O.R. Tambo International Airport and through ordinary postal and courier services. South African customs officials discovered one particularly brazen method when they noticed that packages of "Made in China" children's toys were being routed back to China; on inspection, the boxes contained poached contraband. Succulents are compact, survive without water for extended periods during transit, and are difficult for customs officers to identify at species level, making them well-suited to smuggling.
Of nearly 400,000 plants seized in the Western Cape between 2019 and 2022, 98.7 percent were destined for the Chinese market, according to CapeNature data. Demand is concentrated among urban collectors in China, where a growing middle class with disposable income and limited living space has generated a market for rare ornamental houseplants. Scientific volumes on South African succulents have been translated into Mandarin, arming buyers with the knowledge to seek out specific, rare, and wild-collected specimens.
The trade has also spread beyond its Southern African epicenter. In California, Dudleya succulents, known locally as "liveforevers," have been ripped from coastal cliff faces and state parks by the thousands. The most documented case involved Byungsu Kim, a South Korean national who court documents show had traveled to the United States more than 50 times since 2009. In October 2018, Kim and two co-defendants drove from Los Angeles International Airport to Crescent City, California, and spent three days harvesting Dudleya plants from DeMartin State Beach and Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park. They pulled an additional haul from Russian Gulch State Park in Mendocino County before boxing the plants and transporting them to a commercial exporter in Compton, where the boxes were labeled "Rush" and "Live Plants." The total seizure at the shipping company: 3,715 plants, collectively worth at least $150,000. Sentenced in 2022 to 24 months in federal prison, Kim was later also arrested in South Africa for a similar scheme after fleeing to Mexico and then Seoul to evade US charges.
Some of the plants being pulled out of the ground are not young. A Dioscorea elephantipes, the elephant's-foot succulent, grows so slowly that a specimen with an 18-inch caudex can be almost 100 years old. It is a strange, beautiful plant: its exposed tuberous stem, covered in thick grey-brown bark cracked into polygonal plates, resembles precisely what its name suggests. Each one removed from a rocky hillside is an organism that predates the Second World War. Many of the Conophytum species poached from the Karoo exist on a single rocky outcrop, with a global population numbering in the hundreds. Each theft is not an ecosystem disruption; it is a subtraction from a total so small that the arithmetic of extinction is not theoretical.
Ismail Ebrahim, a scientist at the South African National Biodiversity Institute, has stated plainly that some Conophytum species are now "on the brink of extinction." The illegal harvesting has cascading effects beyond the targeted plants themselves: it damages the soil structure and microhabitats that other species, including reptiles and insects, depend on, and it makes already stressed arid landscapes less resilient to climate shocks.
The community costs are also significant. In the Succulent Karoo, where legitimate economic activity is sparse, the illegal trade has generated visible social strain. Local farmers have expressed frustration as poachers grow bolder. Researchers interviewing community members have found that young people are being drawn into criminal networks as low-level harvesters, capturing a small fraction of the profits while absorbing the full risk of arrest. Katherine Forsythe of WWF-SA has described the structural inequity bluntly: all of the financial benefit flows overseas, while the people on the ground in South Africa receive almost none of it.
South African law sets the penalty for poaching endangered flora at a maximum fine of 400,000 rand or 10 years in prison. In practice, prosecutions rarely produce that outcome. The pattern documented by CapeNature is consistent: those arrested are almost always low-level couriers and local harvesters, not the foreign syndicate operators who organize and profit from the trade. Suspended sentences and fines below the statutory ceiling have been common.
There have been exceptions. In February 2020, two South Korean nationals were each fined 2.5 million rand and given six-year suspended sentences by a Cape Town regional court after being caught with more than 60,000 Conophytum plants. In July 2025, a Calvinia regional court sentenced four foreign nationals to 15 years each for poaching 303 specimens of the critically endangered Clivia mirabilis, a lily species with a black-market value estimated between 6 million and 30 million rand. Environment Minister Dion George called the outcome a "critical milestone." What it actually represents is the exception that proves the rule.
The legal system has also been slow to recognize that plant trafficking warrants the same investigative intensity as animal trafficking. Government meetings addressing ivory, rhino horn, and pangolin scales have routinely excluded plants from the agenda despite calls from IUCN and BGCI to place them on equal footing.
The modern illegal succulent trade has a distinct ignition point. The pandemic lockdowns of 2020 accelerated a trend that had been building: quarantined city-dwellers, unable to access nature outdoors, turned to houseplants in large numbers. In South Korea, China, Japan, and across East Asia, social media platforms amplified the aesthetic of rare succulents. Hashtag communities with hundreds of millions of views on TikTok and Instagram created collectors who wanted not just any succulent, but specific wild-form specimens that nursery propagation could not replicate.
The defining quality of a wild-collected succulent to a serious collector is its age and provenance. A propagated Conophytum grown in a greenhouse over five years does not carry the compressed shape, weathered texture, or field origin of one ripped from a hillside in Namaqualand. This is precisely the logic that made ivory so durable as a commodity: no substitute satisfies the same desire. The irony is that many buyers are genuinely unaware their plant was illegally removed from the ground, purchasing through online marketplaces with falsified certificates of origin.
The enforcement problem is therefore not only about policing. It is about transparency in a supply chain that moves through informal digital markets, postal services, and falsified phytosanitary documents at a global scale. TRAFFIC, BGCI, and SANBI have each called for online platforms to adopt standards for verifying the origin of plants listed for sale. Progress has been incremental.
What has not been incremental is the extraction. The Succulent Karoo continues to lose species that spent millions of years arriving at exactly the forms now being ripped from its surface by the kilogram, packed into shipping boxes, and labeled as toys.