South Africa's honeybush sector must transform from its unjust past: what needs to change

Daily Maverick

a day ago

The biodiversity economy is made up of businesses and economic activities that use living species and ecosystems to make profits without damaging the environment. But in South Africa, it is haunted by economic racism, with indigenous people still not in control of the biodiversity economy. A good example of what's going wrong with transformation initiatives is the story of honeybush tea. Biodiversity economy researcher Sthembile Ndwandwe of the University of Cape Town explains.
Honeybush (Cyclopia spp.) is a plant indigenous to South Africa, with a long history of use as a herbal tea by local people in the Eastern and Western Cape provinces. It has traditionally been used for medicinal purposes.
Efforts to develop the honeybush industry began in the 1900s. Honeybush is still a small and growing industry with little revenue and minimal profits to share with communities. But it is also deeply rooted in centuries of struggle for access to land and natural resources.
What happened to honeybush during colonialism and apartheid?
For centuries, during colonisation, slavery and apartheid in South Africa, control over commercialised plants and animals was handed to white-owned business. Black people were forced off their land by the colonial and apartheid governments. Land was broken up into individual title deeds and handed over to white settlers for commercial agriculture, or to the government for westernised conservation.
The seizure of land for conservation, plantations and commercial agriculture led to the separation of wild plants like honeybush from those who traditionally used them. Honeybush became the property of landowners: the apartheid government, white-owned timber companies, and white commercial farmers.
However, these unjust barriers did not prevent so-called Coloured (mixed-race) and Indigenous Khoi and San communities from continuing to harvest and trade small amounts of honeybush tea.
How should transformation have happened?
Apartheid ended in 1994. This coincided with efforts that began in the early 1990s by the Agricultural Research Council and the South African National Biodiversity Institute to 'rediscover' honeybush. Projects attached to formal honeybush value chains were opened to dispossessed communities who had produced the tea for centuries from wild plants.
The post-apartheid South African government introduced policies to speed up the participation of Black and Indigenous people in the biodiversity economy. A strategy was published in 2015 and a further draft in 2024. These set out ways to include Black and Indigenous people in conservation and businesses involving wild plants (biotrade or bioprospecting) and game animals (the wildlife economy). For example, there were plans to commercialise 25 wild plants, create thousands of jobs, and involve communities in the search for new products (bioprospecting).
The government came up with development plans to develop honeybush businesses, and allocate land and infrastructure to Black and Indigenous honeybush producers to participate. These plans were commendable but did not succeed in transforming the industry.
What's gone wrong?
The focus of transformation was on profit-generation and the number of jobs created. This removed the emphasis from quality jobs and dignity for those who remain racially excluded from enjoying nature.
In some cases, transformation further excluded people. For example, permits have been used since the 1800s to exclude Black and Indigenous harvesters from freely accessing land and harvesting plants. After apartheid ended, the role of permit systems as tools for limiting Black and Indigenous people's movement and access to nature were not questioned. Instead, they became part of the formal honeybush trade. They continue to play a key role in managing access to wild plants.
This formalisation has prevented Black and Indigenous harvesters from picking wild honeybush without a formal permit. It has left them dependent on applying through those who have power for permits, such as white landowners. This has reinforced and legitimised white supremacy over access to land and natural resources.
Secondly, landowners gave permits to white harvest team leaders or supervisors of the workers doing the harvesting. This displaced Black and Indigenous leaders.
Another problem is delayed negotiations around access and benefit sharing. This is meant to direct a share of the profits from biodiversity-based industries to local communities. The agreements are still being negotiated, usually by the government, representatives of the industry and traditional authorities. This excludes the communities who've been producing and fighting for honeybush access for centuries.
Lastly, those with land and processing infrastructure retain power in the honeybush industry. Black and Indigenous people whose families farmed honeybush for generations remain at the margins. They often have to take up disempowered jobs as planters, harvesters (pickers), helpers in processing facilities, and retail packagers.
The result is that Black and Indigenous people have limited control over the honeybush trade and are left in a subordinate position.
Is this part of a bigger problem in the biodiversity economy?
Landlessness is the bigger problem. The majority of people who've lived and worked for generations in honeybush growing regions and who were dispossessed of their land did not get it back after apartheid ended. Instead, less than 25% of South Africa's land has been redistributed to Black and Indigenous people.
When generations of people work with nature, they need sovereignty over space and all the different plants in nature. Being confined to small plots of land means Black and Indigenous people cannot fully use and enjoy all the plants in a region.
What should happen next?
The government, industry representatives, communities involved with honeybush and the National Khoi and San Councils must transform the industry beyond just redistributing a small fee from commercial farmers and honeybsuh businesses. These are important next steps:
Land should be expropriated and redistributed to those involved in the biodiversity economy who are currently landless.
Honeybush is a small industry with little profit to share. Access and benefit sharing systems should be designed to show benefits to communities that are not about money alone – in the form of justice, conservation, and restitution.
Permits must be replaced with systems that are accessible to the people who were previously forced off their land. To do this, my research recommends using the Black gaze: empathising with the dispossession of the original inhabitants of the land, and bearing witness to the domino effect that landlessness has had on Black families historically connected to honeybush.
The absence of traditional knowledge holders in honeybush patent applications means that they're erased from written memory of honeybush intellectual advancements. The honeybush industry needs epistemic justice. This is where Indigenous knowledge is recognised as true and valid, and not only seen as useful if it advances 'science' or helps market products. This will require transformation of the whole honeybush industry, so that traditional knowledge holders are named and remunerated as equal knowers in innovation.
Transforming South Africa's biodiversity economy requires a longer-term vision of changing the exclusionary practices, views and structures that are embedded in our environmental policies. DM