- Open Access funded by Natural Environment Research Council
- Under a Creative Commons license
Open Access
Highlights
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- We test choice experiments for studying consumer preferences in the orchid trade.
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- We identify two key consumer groups: serious hobbyists and mass market buyers.
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- Mass market buyers’ preferences are based on aesthetic attributes of orchids.
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- Hobbyists who buy orchids online prefer rare species.
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- We show that these methods have potential for the study of other wildlife trades.
Abstract
The
demand for wildlife products drives an illegal trade estimated to be
worth up to $10 billion per year, ranking it amongst the top
transnational crimes in terms of value. Orchids are one of the
best-selling plants in the legal horticultural trade but are also traded
illegally and make up 70% of all species listed by the Convention on
the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). To study consumer
preferences for horticultural orchids we use choice experiments to
survey 522 orchid buyers online and at large international orchid shows.
Using latent class modelling we show that different groups of consumers
in our sample have distinct preferences, and that these groups are
based on gender, genera grown, online purchasing and type of grower.
Over half of our sample, likely to be buyers of mass-produced orchids,
prefer white, multi-flowered plants. Of greater conservation interest
were a smaller group consisting of male hobbyist growers who buy their
orchids online, and who were willing to pay significantly more for
species that are rare in trade. This is the first in-depth study of
consumer preferences in the international orchid trade and our findings
confirm the importance of rarity as a driver of hobbyist trade. We show
that market-research methods are a new tool for conservationists that
could provide evidence for more effective conservation of species
threatened by trade, especially via campaigns that focus on demand
reduction or behaviour change.
Keywords
- Anthropogenic allee effect;
- Consumer research;
- Horticulture;
- Latent Class Models;
- Over-collection;
- Plant conservation;
- Rarity;
- Wildlife trade
1. Introduction
The
illegal trade in wildlife is one of the highest value transnational
organised crimes, with an estimated worth of $7 to $10 billion per year
that makes it more lucrative than illicit diamond trafficking and the
small arms trade (Haken, 2011).
Many wildlife products also have a legal trade, the total value of
which is around $249 billion annually, which includes the $222 billion
fish and timber trades (Engler and Parry-Jones, 2007) and $27 billion of trade in species for other markets, including for medicine, food and pets (Broad et al., 2003).
Although smaller, the illegal trade is of significant conservation
concern due to threats from over-harvesting and the wider implications
of ‘by-catch’ of non-target species (Broad et al., 2003), the spread of diseases (Gómez and Aguirre, 2008), as well as security concerns from the growth of organised crime syndicates (Haken, 2011).
For these reasons, efforts to tackle wildlife trade are a conservation
priority and take many forms, a diversity of which is required to tackle
an often secretive and evolving threat (Broad et al., 2003).
International legislation to control wildlife trade takes the form of
the 1975 Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES). CITES aims to monitor and restrict trade in the 35,497 species
and 71 subspecies of animals and plants that are listed on one of its
three appendices (CITES, 2013).
In addition to legislation, ‘supply-side’ methods target producers by
attempting to reduce market prices for illegal wildlife, for example by
flooding the market with sustainable or farmed alternatives (Bulte and Damania, 2005).
At the opposite end of the trade chain, ‘demand side’ methods focus on
reducing consumer demand, through targeted educational or high profile
media or marketing campaigns (Broad et al., 2003, Williams et al., 2012, Coghlan, 2014 and United for Wildlife, 2014).
However, in spite of this recognised importance of demand there still
exists a relatively poor understanding of factors that influence it,
such as consumer preference for different products.
Here
we present the first study aiming to address this shortfall in
knowledge by testing a novel method for understanding the
characteristics of wildlife products that are preferred by different
groups of buyers. We use orchids as our case study as they are the
largest taxonomic group listed by CITES. All 26,000 known species of
orchid are listed by the convention, making up 9.8% of Appendix I, 73%
of Appendix II and 70% of total CITES species (CITES, 2013).
Orchids are particularly susceptible to over-collection from trade due
to naturally small populations and high sensitivity to other threats,
such as habitat degradation (Koopowitz, 2001). Large-scale over-harvesting of wild orchids has been recorded to supply the medicinal (e.g. Traditional Asian Medicine: Liu et al., 2014), edible (e.g. Salep in Iran: Ghorbani et al., 2014) and horticultural (e.g. Bulbophyllum spp.: Vermeulen et al., 2014) trades. At greatest risk are those species listed on CITES Appendix I, including all Paphiopedilum and Phragmipedium
species, part of the group known as slipper orchids that are extremely
popular in horticultural trade. Over-collection of slipper orchid
species has resulted in the decline of wild populations, species
extinctions and, in the case of Phragmipedium kovachii smuggled to the US from Peru, even disputes between nations over sovereignty of natural resources ( Averyanov et al., 2003, Averyanov et al., 2010 and Pittman, 2012).
Although not all orchids are threatened by trade, the entire family was
included on CITES due to the difficulty that non-experts face in
discriminating between closely related species.
We
focus on the orchid horticultural trade in particular as it is the most
diverse market in terms of consumers and species sold and has both a
well-developed legal trade and an illegal trade, which has been linked
to the decline of orchids in the wild (Averyanov et al., 2003 and Vermeulen and Lamb, 2011). The orchid horticultural trade dates back over 2 000 years in China and Japan (Paek and Murthy, 2002)
and reached a peak in the nineteenth century when wealthy European
collectors suffering from ‘orchidelirium’ imported large quantities of
wild plants from around the world (Pittman, 2012).
Today orchids are no longer just for the rich, as improvements in
horticultural technology have made mass-produced hybrids of a few genera
one of the top selling pot plants in the world (FloraHolland, 2013 and USDA, 2014).
In addition, there still exists a smaller specialist market, where
hobbyists in an international network of orchid societies grow a wider
range of species and hybrids. Finally, growing domestic markets in Latin
America, China and Southeast Asia may include hybrids and species sold
to both specialist and non-specialist consumers (e.g. Phelps and Webb, 2015).
It is the latter two markets that have been linked to over-harvesting
of wild plants for trade due to collection for sale at local markets or
international orchid shows, orders from buyers for specific species, or
from nursery owners hoping to incorporate desirable wild traits into new
hybrids (Pittman, 2012 and Phelps and Webb, 2015). Whilst trade in wild-collected plants at markets in tropical regions has been the focus of some research (e.g. Flores-Palacios and Valencia-Diaz, 2007 and Phelps and Webb, 2015),
little attention has been paid to the study of the conservation
implications of the formal international orchid trade. Here we aim to
address this shortfall in knowledge by focussing our study on important
orchid buying countries including Japan and the UK.
