In most parts of this site we emphasize the fact that the best hoodia gordonii comes from South Africa. Even more, some cheap hoodia products might be counterfeited with mexican or chinese hoodia or other hoodia varieties. The most frequent situation is that counterfeited hoodia does not have hoodia at all.

Is it correct to say that the only hoodia gordonii as raw material comes from South Africa? The answer is NO. But let us explain some points about it.

The San tribes that discovered the hoodia gordonii effects some thousand years ago, were basically around the Kalahari desert. In fact, to wide the concept, the indigenous were experiencing the hoodia gordonii benefits at both the Kalahari and Namib deserts in Southern Africa.

It is true that South Africa as a nation discovered the hoodia gordonii benefits for weight loss. The CSIR is a south african national research agency and it was where main research started.

Furthermore, today, the largest commercial plantations are mainly established in South Africa. But not only there. In fact, other neighbour countries are harvesting hoodia gordonii, basically in an illegal form, because wild plantations are collected to be exported (smuggled shall be a better term to define the situation) violating the CITES convention.

CITES, a UN Watchdog organization for the protection of international trade in endangered species (both plant and animal), controls the harvests and exports of Hoodia Gordonii. Exports are under very tight control and every shipment must include documentation that proves the material is legal and licensed. Without this documentation, Hoodia Gordonii cannot be exported out of South Africa to world markets. 

But even when the best product is obtained today from South Africa, and south african hoodia gordonii is valued as the best, because natural habitat for the plant is found there, in no way we can assure hoodia gordonii may only be produced in South Africa.

It would be as if we should say that aloe vera must only be produced in South Africa or Socotra because originally the plant was found wild there. As we deal daily into the aloe business, -a succulent as the hoodia gordonii, almost a sister plant- we know that mexican or venezuelan aloe is as good as the south african one or even better. In the same line, coffee had a natural habitat in Arabia and Ethiopia but today Colombia is a leading supplier, and nobody is claiming about colombian origin.

South African Hoodia

Hoodia and Southern Africa has a long relationship. It started in 1937, when a Dutch anthropologist studying the San indigenous people in the Kalahari desert near what is now the South Africa-Namibia border noted that they sucked on the Hoodia plant as an appetite suppressant and thirst quencher.

These bushmen did not eat on their two to three day hunts; instead, they munched on the stem of this succulent to suppress their hunger and thirst.

Three decades ago, South African scientists at a government lab called the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research began studying the Hoodia plant and noticed that lab animals eating this plant lost weight, but otherwise did well.