Plant-smuggling trade worries botanists

Press, 2 January 1985, Page 27

Plant-smuggling trade worries botanists

NZPA-Reuter Madrid While many people think of diamonds or cocaine when they hear of smuggling they are probably less aware that thousands of rare plants are spirited illegally across international borders each year. The trade in endangered plants is brisk and lucrative and botanists are dismayed that it shows no sign of abating. "There will always be elite collectors who want to hoard things just because there are few of them,” said Grenville Lucas, head of the herbarium at Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. “Owning a rare ornamental plant stolen from the wilds is like having a Rembrandt,” he said. Just one cycad, a fernlike tropical plant plentiful

when dinosaurs roamed the earth, could fetch SUS7O,OOO ($144,200), he said. Mr Lucas and other experts warned a recent meeting in Madrid of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature — the world’s largest wildlife group — that between 25,000 and 40,000 plant species could be wiped out in less than 100 years. The estimated loss of two plant species a day could mean a more serious obliteration of species than in the last big biological extinction 65 million years ago, they said. Particularly endangered plants include the wild African violet, the Ethiopian yeheb nut bush, which is a food source being wiped out by grazing and harvesting and the world’s largest flow-?, the Indonesian giant

rafflesia — its rain forest habitat is threatened. Faith Campbell, an observer of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, said some traffic in rare plants had slowed since the accord took effect in 1975. The 87 signatory nations to the convention vowed to restrict the collecting and commerce of tens of thousands of plant and animal species. Success stories such as crackdowns on West German “wildlife tours,” which plundered wild plants in Latin America, are still outnumbered by tales of smuggling from countries which have not joined the treaty. Scores of ariocarpus, a rare Mexican cactus which takes about 100 years to reach the size of an ashtray, had slipped across the

border into the United States because of bureaucratic loopholes and lax enforcement of export controls, said Ms Campbell. Millions of orchids traded every year leave their native Asia, Africa and Latin America without proper permits. One main obstacle to fighting plant smuggling is that it provides muchneeded revenue for people in the third world. “If you are poor and know you can make money by digging a cactus by the roadside or pulling up a cycad, who am I to tell you not to sell it?” asked Mr Lucas. He suggested that third world countries should develop nurseries to grow endangered plants for export.