They will all be plucked from the wild and will die on the market floor, whether they are exported or not
There is a famous orchid grower in Vietnam, who told the story that when hangianum was first discovered in Vietnam, the price was minimum some thousands of dollar in Europe and it was so rare in European countries, yet at the same time , the sellers from Vietnam highland could not even get rid of the plants in Vietnam, every week , sacks of plants came down to the city, he had to buy so many to save them , because otherwise they would just die if the wholesalers could not find new owners who would want them .
He paid about 20,000 Vietnam Dong (equal to 1.43 US dollar exchange rate for the year 1999 ) for 1kg which he said depending on the size of the plants , average 35 hangianum plants a kg (but these hangianum are big mature plants) so it was 4.08 US cents a plant. In the end, he had to get a big warehouse to store all of the plants he saved, which were 100,000 hangianum plants (it was tough for him, because 4,000 US dollar was a lot money there and then , Vietnamese did not make that much of money 20 years ago).
Then when they started to flower , he sent an employee carry them on an ox drawn cart around the city to sell them off. Nobody wanted them even in flower. At the time Vietnamese didn't care about slipper orchids , even today they still prefer dendrobiums (go figure)
Then, artificially seed sown & cultivated hangianum plants & hangianum hybrids (they look beautiful uniform in size and meticulous leaves ) were available at the last NYC orchid show at Rockefeller center (was it in 2007 ? someone may remember the exact year that this big international show no longer organized !!!), I really don't remember the price anymore, perhaps 60 or 80 dollar a plant , I was so thrilled to see them at the show, I bought 20 plants of just the hangianum species alone, plus many of the hang hybrids . So many plants from that show, It took me many trips to bring them home. Imagine had I live in Vietnam , I could use that same amount of money to save 39,215 hangianum plants from dying or nearly half of the contain in his warehouse.
By the way , Vietnamese start to make money now, and the rich ones are very rich, and they start to fancy orchids , now there is a cut section from a wild mother plant with two tiny dendrobium anosmum keiki buds a few millimeter not even rooted yet is bidded for 3,500,000,000 Vietnamese dong =150,946 dollars . I think they start to resemble Japanese in this aspect
minute 0:35 to minute 0:54
how about the charity auction for this tiny 9 cm (3.6 inch) anosmum for 1,200,000,000 VN dong or 51,741 US dollar
Do these prices remind anyone of the "DUTCH TULIP CRAZE" ? granted there is a time span of 20 years , still a 4 cents mature hangianum versus 151,000 dollar 2 milimeter anosmum starting buds
just a note for the metric system users, a comma in dollar is another thousand and the period is the cut off for the cents behind, so for the price above it is 3.5 billion VN dong or 151 thousand US dollars (I think your system use the period between the thousand , and the comma before the cents)
