How Five Ancient Baobabs Nearly Left South Africa for a Billionaire’s Park

Controls. Is smuggling of plants a big issue in South Africa? And what do you think is being done to combat it? I think, for some context, the smuggling of environmental products, such as it is at a global scale, it's a massive problem. In fact, the UN Office on Transnational Crime, UNODC, which also deals with drug offences, has estimated

That the smuggling of environmental products is really number four after drugs, human trafficking, and counterfeit fake goods. So the value is somewhere between was estimated at around 21 billion US dollars per year. So it is a massive problem. And I think what's interesting in this case, it was such a big tree that you couldn't miss it.

The unfortunate part is with much smaller plants, particularly succulents, rhino horns, pangolin scales, insects, spiders, colourful wildlife that has a novelty value in the pet trade. People living in apartments in China or the States or Europe, often a plant or an insect is very low maintenance compared to a dog. And there is

That growing interest. Obviously, with rhino horn, that's a very different market. It's either for status and traditional medicinal use, and the same with pangolin scales. But the difficulty is that once something is hidden in a container, unless you have very thorough random checks and unload those containers, the potential to smuggle enormous quantities of those products, and I don't really like that word, but it has to serve a purpose, is just enormous.

Interestingly, there was a project in Tanzania where a lot of countries had a legacy of landmines following civil wars, and a large species of cane rat was used, was trained to detect drugs. Initially, they were specifically trained to sniff out the TNT in landmines. But then they thought, well, actually, this could be quite useful in the wildlife.

Trafficking arena. And at a place in Mora Gora, they've been training for some time, rats, to be able to go into shipping containers and have a sniff around and then somehow signal their handlers. And this is, you know, you can't, humans can't really squeeze into those tight corners. And likewise, dogs are sometimes too big. So that's quite a promising potential tool in handling this issue. But for the time being,