National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act, 2004 (Act No. 10 of 2004)

In the Western Cape, Cape 5 Nature seldom receives reports of illegal A. ferox harvest because most of the harvesting occurs on small areas of private land, and landowners control activities on their properties. Even when some companies bring their own workers in to harvest an area, harvesting is still undertaken with the permission of the landowner. The tappers and landowners in this region confirm that there have never been any incidents of illegal harvesting.

In the Eastern Cape however, (where harvesting largely occurs on communal land in accordance with an agreement with the Traditional authority), tappers are concerned about illegal activities. Unskilled tappers (who do not obtain permission to harvest) reportedly follow the compliant tappers into the fields and harvest the remaining leaves from already harvested plants in the region. Sometimes plants are left with only 3 - 5 or fewer leaves (DEA, 2014).

It is difficult to ascertain the scale of illegal harvest but an earlier study by Newton and Vaughan (1996) reported a high likelihood of an illegal trade in A. ferox extracts, almost equivalent in scale to that of the legal trade and involving the harvest of some 7 million plants per year. Whilst this may be an overestimate and is in need of updating, it is possible that an illegal trade is ongoing (Knapp, 2006; Malin et al., 2017) due to a lack of proactive management in the aloe industry (Knapp, 2006). The current illegal off-take and trade is nevertheless considered to be negligible at this time.