In the world of aisle ethics, who owns the taste of the Global South?

Standing in my neighbourhood Whole Foods in Chicago, there’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes from holding a tin of bougie rooibos. 

The packaging is admittedly beautiful: burnt sienna and terracotta, a shrub of some sort. I assume it to be the Aspalathus linearis, grown wild for millennia in the Cederberg, an ancient sandstone wilderness north of Cape Town. The price tag reads nearly $15 (approximately R240). For 36 bags. 

I grew up drinking this tea. My mom brewed it in a special enamel pot, serving it black and with just a touch of sugar. 

In my Checkers supermarket in Swellendam, the same volume of tea costs the equivalent of about $3 (around R50). To be fair, some lesser non-organic brands can cost around $5 (around R80), but still.

The sticker gap

That hefty priceis not a shipping premium. Nor easily dismissed as another tariff casualty.  It’s part of a bigger story. A carefully constructed narrative of authenticity, terroir, and the romance of the Global South, while little of the profit flows back to the Cederberg.

What I’m holding in my hand, this overpriced tinned memory, represents the quiet machinery of what scholars call biopiracy. The term surfaces in pharmaceuticals and agriculture, where Western firms have monopolised resources like neem, turmeric, and ayahuasca. 

But the everyday version is subtler. The cargo now is cultural. A flavour, a tradition, a plant that survived because generations of indigenous people tended it, named it, and prized its seeds. The extraction is laundered through the language of wellness, the promise of the exotic, and artisanal craft.

A Rooibos “win”

Rooibos is instructive precisely because it represents what a “win” looks like, and how modest that gain truly is. In 2019, after decades of advocacy, South Africa reached a landmark Rooibos Benefit-Sharing Agreement. It was the first of its kind under the Nagoya Protocol, an international framework designed to ensure communities whose biological resources are commercialised receive a fair share of the profits.

Under that agreement, the industry directs a 1.5% levy on the farm gate price of rooibos to the Khoikhoi and San peoples. Communities that first identified the plant’s properties. And while celebrated as a model for indigenous intellectual property rights, the numbers tell a more complicated story.

Analysts value the global rooibos market at approximately $1.38 billion (R23 billion) in 2024. Projections place the market at $1.53 billion (R25 billion) by 2026.

Yet, the annual benefit-sharing distribution to the Indigenous communities whose ancestral knowledge made that market possible amounts to roughly $1.2 million (R20 million), less than 0.1% of the total market value.

Split across thousands of community members, that’s a gesture, not a stab at livelihood.  European and American brands largely control the industry’s marketing apparatus. And it has built a billion-dollar narrative around the very indigeneity it barely compensates.

Tequila’s Trojan horse

The tequila industry offers a variation on the same problem. It is however, complicated by the fact that Mexico does hold a functioning Geographical Indication (GI), a Protected Designation of Origin. The GI legally limits tequila production to specific states. It requires blue agave as the base ingredient. On paper, this should be a success story. In practice, GI has become a kind of Trojan horse.

The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary influx of American celebrity capital into Mexican tequila. George Clooney’s Casamigos sold to Diageo for $1 billion (R15.97 billion) in 2017.

In 2026m however, Casamigo is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging their “100% Agave” products are falsely labeled, not authentic, and contain non-agave, industrial alcohol.

Then there’s the Jenner thing

Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila, launched in 2021, drew controversy for the cultural appropriation optics of a California socialite branding herself against imagery of Mexican agave fields. Critics noted that the name references a Calabasas area code, disconnecting the brand from its Jalisco roots. Some suggest the venture represented a “gentrification” of the tequila industry.

But, if anything, Jenner’s 818 says a lot about the future of the industry itself. 

Celebrity mezcal and tequila brands, chasing volume and margin, favour the fast-growing, high-yield agave varieties. the Blue Weber agave as opposed to wild-harvested, slow-maturing, or alternative agave species. They covet large industrial distilleries, the fabricas, over small palenques where mezcaleros still roast piñas in underground pits.

Dire consequences 

The consequences are sobering. Agave prices paid to small farmers have collapsed from roughly $1.60/kg (R26/kg) at the height of the boom to as low as $0.25/kg (R4/kg). All this while 500 million litres of tequila sit in Mexican warehouses, a massive oversupply known as the otherwise delicious-sounding “Tequila Lake.”

For context, it takes approximately seven kilograms of agave to produce a single bottle. The raw material cost to a producer has fallen to under $2.00 (R32), yet retail prices for premium and celebrity tequilas in US stores remain comfortably above $50.00 (R799), often more. The value is not in question. It is redistributed northward, into brand equity that belongs to people who have never roasted a piña in their lives.

The irony is sharp. The PDO that was meant to protect Mexican heritage has, at scale, become a quality-control certification that American capital uses to justify its premium pricing, while farmers who grow agave are left holding a commodity whose price they cannot control.

Biopiracy lives in the supply chain. It is the difference between who owns the brand and who takes the environmental risk. The structure is nearly universal: the farmer absorbs climate risk and soil depletion; the corporation owns the trademark and captures the margin.

The Nagoya loophole

One of the most consequential loopholes in international conservation law was, for years, hiding in plain sight. The Nagoya Protocol obligated companies to share profits whenever they used a country’s biological resources. but it said nothing about digital copies of those resources.

So pharmaceutical and biotech firms did the obvious thing: they downloaded DNA sequences from public databases and skipped the royalties entirely. That workaround collapsed in February 2025, when the UN established the Cali Fund, compelling companies that commercialize genetic data to pay in roughly 0.1% of revenue or 1% of profits, with at least half earmarked for Indigenous communities.

Now comes the harder part. Member governments face a critical February 28, 2026 deadline to prove they’ve built the legal infrastructure to enforce it. Compliance looks patchy at best.

Indigenous groups, meanwhile, are no longer waiting on the sidelines: a new permanent body created at the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 16 in Cali) has given them a direct hand in shaping the rules.

The real reckoning arrives in October at COP 17 in Armenia, where negotiators must answer a familiar question. Whether the world’s voluntary commitments will amount to anything more than aspiration.

“Authenticity” comes at a price 

I think about this whenever I move through a wellness aisle and recognise “discoveries” from my childhood, repackaged as a revelation. Honeybush, for example, is now having its moment. Hint: sugarbush may well be next if anyone wants to make a bit of cash.

To strip the history from a plant and replace it with a lifestyle brand is not just a marketing decision. It’s an attempt at selective erasure. Respecting and honouring geographical indications also means accepting that the “authenticity” being sold at $15 (almost R240) a tin has authors. Those authors deserve more than a pic on the packaging.

Back at Halsted Whole Foods, I put the rooibos down. It would taste great with a rusk, I think. The tea inside is the same tea my mom made. The only thing that changed is who gets to call it theirs.