I think Bodai is slightly wrong.
Unfortunately,the plants are collected also if there is not demand!!!I've seen in many countries in the tropics thousand plants dieing because no one wants.Many local peoples have compleately no money and no way to work,and try to make some money using resources from the wild...
That one is half correct too :evil:
The plants are definitely collected if there is no demand at all, daily, weekly, monthly. People collect tranlienianum and helenae without purpose. helenae is now a 'traditional chinese medecine', so the market is high - and the price is around 10us/kg nowadays in bulk.
Now, it is not the local people who have no money, it is people who have quite some money, like the resellers from Hanoi, who non-stop order plants, and kill them within weeks, just in the hope that a foreigner will come and buy 10US a paph that they just bought for 5US/kg.
The massive collection comes from the cheap price that Vietnamese traders force the Vietnameses suppliers to sell their plants - by kg instead of plant, and an enormous greed of the local Vietnamese traders for profit that lead to many plants to be collected.
If they accepted to pay the collector 0.5US/plant, and sell it 10US, they would still make profit, but in their mind 'less', because they pay 0.5US/plant, translate to 100US/kg of paphiopedilum helenae, tranlienianum, or coccineum. The 'good business' according to them is to pay 5US/kg. From that, it is out of their minds to think that if they pay 5Us/kg and kill 20kg, because no one can pot so many plants in so short time, they are loosing more money tha buying 100 perfect plants from the collector every few months. They do not want to put added value to their jungle paphs, unlike the Malays, or the Thais.
countries...many times not linked to the"flower market" itself...example collecting for medical purposes(I know there is a traditional chinese medicine receipt with paphs new shoots...they take new growth and throw away the rest of the plant!!!).
It is the first reason why so many orchids become extinct in Vietnam at the very present time, not the species trade at all.
The main problem is to educate the Vietnamese orchid traders about some simple trade concepts, and force them to follow it.
100kg of paph coccineum that they will buy in Hanoi from the countryside grower for 500USD = 500USD.
1 foreigner pay 2-5 USD/plant, 100 plants, sold - and 100kg is about 20.000 plants, I have seen such shipments.
But, it is wrong to think that 20.000 x 5 USD = the profit of the trader, because:
* The trader does not know how to keep those plants alive more than a couple of weeks, no one in Hanoi does.
* There are too many to repot, cut, care and treat within a few days - coccineum MUST be repotted within a week or it is heavily set back.
* One day, they will not be able to press the countryside people in selling the coccineum for 5US, because there will be no more.
Most of the killed paphs just end up in the Vietnamese traders houses, dying, nowhere else, and because it's their wish. At that point, the foreign customers have nothing to do with that, because, even when there is no demand for delenatii for the last 5 years, the collectors and traders play with kilos and kilos and boxers of that species, killing everything, in the permanent hope that the wealthy foreigner that was mentionned 10 years ago and paid the delenatii 10US will come tomorrow...
I plan to write an orchid culture book for Vietnamese too, that would be useful, especially in the north, where the basic concepts are not understood, and kill many plants....
