“Bush Doctors and Wild Medicine”: The Scale of Trade in Cape Town's Informal Economy of Wild-Harvested Medicine and Traditional Healing

South Africa's organically emerged cultural business of traditional healing is almost exclusively reliant on wild-harvested resources extracted from wilderness areas or open-access commons. The wild medicine business has been described for much of South Africa, although is little understood in Cape Town, the urban centerpiece of the Cape Floristic Region (CFR). A census of different traditional healer typologies in five typical working-class residential areas (representing ~71,500 residents) was conducted to assess the nature and extent of traditional medicine harvesting and trade. Extrapolating these findings for the city reveals a local industry of more than 15,000 practitioners collectively conducting trade worth US $15.6 million per year. More than 40% of the volume of traditional medicines traded in the city is harvested from the CFR. Future conservation approaches must consider that the business of traditional healing and dispensing wild-harvested medicines is both economically important and culturally entrenched.