The leaves and young shoots of the rooibos bush (Aspalathus linearis) have been used by indigenous peoples of the Western Cape since pre-history to produce a health-giving beverage known as rooibos tea. It was only in the early 1900s that the species began to be cultivated on a commercial basis.

The cultivated rooibos variety is fast-growing and high-yielding, but less resistant to pests and drought than wild varieties. Because of increasing demand, much of the species natural habitat has been plowed up and put under intensive mono-crop cultivation. There are very few areas remaining where wild tea plants can still be found in marginal and mountainous areas. Like the wild tea, small-scale "coloured" farmers were also limited to the more marginal areas by successive colonial and apartheid laws. Communities of small-scale rooibos farmers have been harvesting wild and cultivated rooibos for many generations, and have become the de facto guardians of the wild rooibos genetic stock.

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EMG facilitated a programme of Action Research with small-farmers of the Heiveld Co-op and Wupperthal Co-op to identify, characterise and map populations of wild tea.

The knowledge built up in this action-research programme has been collected in the publication The Sustainable Harvest of Wild Rooibos, also available in Afrikaans hard-copy from EMG.