Overharvesting and the Threat to the Species

Iboga is described as endangered in a great deal of Western writing and as Least Concern by the body that assessed it. This page is about why both statements can be made, and what is actually known.

The assessment, read closely

Tabernanthe iboga was assessed in 2019 by a tree specialist group and categorised Least Concern. Population trend stable. Extent of occurrence over two million square kilometres.

Its justification is that the species has a very wide distribution, a large population, no current major threats and no identified significant future threats.

Now read the rest of the record.

An assessment can be correct on this evidence and it is a thin evidence base for a global category. The whole species-specific literature it cites is a single paper more than half a century old.

What nobody has done

This is the load-bearing negative and it is a searched one rather than an impression.

We ran systematic searches of the medical and life-science literature for this species crossed with conservation, sustainability, harvest, overharvesting, population and inventory terms. The hits are biosynthesis papers, synthetic chemistry and clinical work. Not one is a population study, an inventory or a measurement of harvesting pressure.

So: a species carries a global conservation category, is described worldwide as threatened, and has never been counted in a peer-reviewed study. That is the honest state of it, and it is the reason both camps can cite something.

What the botany says about harvesting

The botanical monograph is where the concern actually comes from, and it is specific.

Whole plants are uprooted to harvest the roots, and the monograph describes this as leading to large-scale destruction of natural stands. It adds that no germplasm collections of the species exist, and that while iboga is not yet threatened in its natural environment, it may become endangered in the near future if demand remains high.

Two facts make that arithmetic worse. The plant reaches about sixty centimetres in three years and needs five to six years before it reproduces. And the alkaloids concentrate in the root bark, so the part in demand is the part whose removal kills the plant.

Iboga root bark covers why that part specifically, and growing iboga covers the propagation that could change the equation.

No international trade control

Worth stating because it is widely assumed otherwise.

Iboga appears in no CITES appendix. We verified this against the European regulation that transposes the appendices, in which the entry for its plant family lists three other genera and not this one.

The family is in scope. The genus is not listed. There is no international permit requirement on iboga, and any provider claiming to hold one is describing something that does not exist.

What Gabon has done

The monograph, written in 2006, recorded a specific gap: the government considered iboga a national patrimony, but there was no law protecting it against overexploitation.

That has changed. Export has been suspended by ministerial order since February 2019, and a 2026 decree regulates the whole sector, classifying iboga as strategic national heritage, requiring prior authorisation from the culture ministry for any iboga activity, framing patent applications on the resource and its derivatives, and creating a sovereign fund.

Iboga in Gabon covers those instruments, and biopiracy and the Nagoya Protocol covers the benefit-sharing question they sit inside.

What we could not verify

A 2012 report commissioned by the Gabonese government, widely cited as establishing that iboga is disappearing from the forest, we could not retrieve. Secondary accounts note that its conclusions are considered speculative by some in the absence of a national park survey. We do not cite it as data.

Reported price rises in Libreville, described as roughly tenfold over a decade, come from a researcher-authored non-governmental publication rather than a measurement. We report it as that.

And there is no Gabonese protected-species listing for iboga, no national red list entry and no official seizure series that we could find.

The position to hold

Not endangered, and not fine either.

The category says Least Concern on an evidence base of four databases and a 1969 paper. The botany says the harvest kills whole plants and destroys stands at scale. The demand is rising and the plant takes six years to reproduce. And the one measurement that would settle it has never been made.

A site that told you it was endangered would be overstating. One that told you it was safe would be worse. What is true is that nobody knows, and that the people best placed to be harmed by getting it wrong live where it grows.