Will Kalahari people benefit from hoodia weight-loss plant frenzy?

The hoodia plant (hoodia gordonii) is a thorny succulent naturally occurring in the Kalahari Desert, which spans Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. It has traditionally been chewed by the San people of the desert on long hunting trips away from home because of its hunger-suppressing properties.

It is those appetite-suppressing properties that have created a frenzy of demand for hoodia in the world dieting industry, with the crop fetching as much as $40 an ounce. The Baltimore Sun recently ran an article on some of the effects this has had in the plant's area of origin.

The demand for it is so strong that wild supplies of a plant that was already officially listed as endangered have been severely reduced. Smuggling of the plant is is rife and Southern African farmers are scrambling to benefit from the new opportunities.

Though still tiny, the industry is rife with fierce competitive secrecy, quack products and illegal harvesting. Whether hoodia works as a diet aid has not been scientifically proven, but anecdotal evidence and the experience of the Kalahari's San people are enough proof for many obese consumers in wealthy countries looking for easy ways to lose weight.

South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research isolated and identified P57, the active ingredient, and patented it in 1996, later licensing British firm Phytofarm to develop and commercialize it. The council argues that anyone who sells hoodia as a weight-reduction product outside that license would infringe on the patent. Multinational company Unilever entered into a licensing deal with Phytofarm. Under legal pressure from lawyers representing the San tribesmen, Phytofarm signed a royalty deal with them.

South Africa is the only African country exporting hoodia legally. The amount of hoodia exported to Europe and the U.S. America under permit from that country's Western Cape province more than doubled in the past year from 22 tons to 49, raising suspicions that significant smuggling was going on. There are reports of hoodia flowing through the province from other parts of South Africa or other countries.

"This smuggling is a huge concern because it's undermining the whole industry," said a farmer trying to cultivate the plant. He sees one of the three types of hoodia containing P57 as having commercial potential as an organically-grown salad crop. "There was smuggling of hoodia before we woke up to it. When the local people realized this thing was of commercial value, they started ripping the plants up in the wild."

Some in Namibia hope that if the market is brought under control, the hoodia craze could benefit the country's poor. Others fear that commercial farmers and giants such as Unilever could clean up while poor communities are paid a pittance for manual labor on hoodia farms.