Rooibos Pays the Khoi and San for Their Knowledge
Since 2019 the rooibos industry has paid the Khoi and San a share of its earnings for the knowledge that the red bush makes a drink. Here is how that came about, how the levy works, and the argument that it does not go far enough.
Yes, since 2019 the rooibos industry pays the Khoi and San a share of what it earns, for the knowledge that the plant makes a drink. The payment is a levy of 1.5 percent of the farm-gate price, the price a processor pays a farmer for each kilogram of dried leaf, and it follows every kilogram traded back to the two communities the law names as the first to know what the plant was for. That is the short answer, and it is a settled fact. The longer story is worth your evening, because no earlier benefit-sharing deal anywhere had bound a whole industry rather than one company, and because some of the people closest to the bush argue the arrangement still does not reach far enough.
Rooibos is grown and sold as a modern crop, but the knowledge that the plant makes a drink is old. The Khoikhoi and the San, the first peoples of the Cederberg and the wider Western Cape, gathered the wild bush, chopped the stems and crushed the leaves to turn them from green to red, and dried them in the sun long before any of it was written down. When a commercial industry grew in the twentieth century, it was built on that inherited knowledge and paid nothing for it.
From a wild plant to an export crop, with no thanks paid
European settlers recorded the use of rooibos in the eighteenth century, and a trade began in the early twentieth, helped along by the Clanwilliam merchant Benjamin Ginsberg. Cultivation became possible in the 1930s, once the district surgeon Pieter Nortier found that scoring the plant's stubborn seed coat was the trick that let it sprout to order. The full account of that is its own story, told in how rooibos became a crop. From there the crop grew into an export worth tens of millions of dollars a year.
The people whose ancestors had identified the plant's use saw none of that value. Many Khoi and San farm workers in the region remained among its poorest participants, which is the quiet injustice the agreement was meant to address.
The law that turned a grievance into a claim
The question of who owns traditional knowledge moved from grievance to a claim with legal standing through the Nagoya Protocol, an international agreement under the Convention on Biological Diversity that took effect in 2014. It holds that when a commercial product draws on the traditional knowledge of a community, that community should share in the benefits. South Africa had already written the principle into its own biodiversity law, the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act of 2004, which goes a step further than the Protocol by regulating the use of the whole indigenous resource, not only its genetic components.
That left one question to settle: whose knowledge was it? A 2014 study commissioned by the national environment department concluded that the traditional knowledge of rooibos lies with the San and the Khoikhoi. That finding gave the two communities, represented by the South African San Council and the National Khoi-San Council, the standing to negotiate with the industry, represented by the South African Rooibos Council.
Nine years of talking, and a signing in a hut by the sea
The talking was not quick. The South African San Council opened formal negotiations in 2010, the National Khoi-San Council joined in 2012, and the agreement was finalised in May 2019 and launched that November, after nine years. The organisation Natural Justice provided the legal support, representing thirty indigenous communities and three Cederberg farming communities through the process. The launch took place on 1 November 2019 at !Khwa ttu, a San heritage centre on the coast north of Cape Town.
How the levy works, and why it is a world first
At the centre of the agreement is the traditional knowledge levy: 1.5 percent of the farm-gate price of rooibos, charged from 1 January 2019. Because almost all rooibos passes through a processor, the levy is collected at that single point and so reaches across the whole industry rather than one company. That is what makes it unusual. It was the first time the Nagoya Protocol had been applied to an entire industry at once. Every earlier benefit-sharing deal had been between one company and one community; this one binds the trade as a whole.
The money is collected and passed to two trusts, one for each community, which decide independently how it is used. At the outset the industry put the levy at an estimated nine million rand a year (roughly US$600,000 at the time), and it moves with the price and the size of the harvest. A 2025 academic analysis of the agreement puts the actual levy closer to US$700,000 a year, paid to the South African San Council and the National Khoi-San Council.
Where the first money went, split down the middle
The first cycle of funds was paid out in July 2022: 12.2 million rand (about US$740,000 at the time), divided exactly in half, with the Khoi-Khoi Peoples Biodiversity and Rooibos Trust and the Andries Steenkamp ABS Trust each receiving 6,138,961.25 rand. Each trust decides its own use through business plans submitted by community structures. The stated purposes are broad: to protect cultural heritage, to advance education and development, and to improve livelihoods. The two councils set their own priorities from there, which is the point of the structure, that the communities, not the industry, decide.
What it settles, and the argument that it does not settle enough
The agreement is widely cited as a landmark, the clearest working case of an industry paying a community for the knowledge it was built on. As of 2025, researchers who study the deal have pressed a harder question, and it is worth weighing.
In a 2025 analysis, Rachel Wynberg, June Bam-Hutchison and Sarah Ives argued that the levy has not changed who owns and benefits most from rooibos. By their account, Indigenous small-scale farmers control less than 7 percent of rooibos land and grow only about 2 percent of the crop, while the rest of the industry cultivates roughly 93 percent. They calculate that small-scale farmers receive only about 5 percent of the agreement's benefits, while paying into the same 1.5 percent levy as everyone else, since it is charged on the price every farmer receives.
A levy on knowledge does not redistribute the land the bush grows on, or the ownership of the farms and the processing companies that turn it into a crop. Wynberg, Bam-Hutchison and Ives conclude that the deal "has not brought about the changes needed to address social and economic inequities," and they are calling for a more radical rethink of how such agreements are designed.
Sources
- South African Rooibos Council, Khoi and San to share in benefits of Rooibos
- South African Rooibos Council, Khoi and San receive first cycle of benefit-sharing funds from Rooibos industry
- Natural Justice, The Rooibos Access and Benefit-Sharing Agreement
- South African Government, Payment of benefits from rooibos to San and Khoi communities a milestone for industrywide collaboration
- The Conversation, South Africa's small-scale rooibos tea growers aren't getting much from an industry deal, why it's not fair