At this point, probably all the Vietnamese species are lab propagated.
The others are scarce.
But they have been bred and flasked in Europe and Asia to such an extent that as far as I know nearly all on the market (black market in the US) are seed grown.
Since only the better ones are bred, theoretically this should help prevent collection by removing the demand. Many people believe that the best conservation solution is to flood the market with propagated seedlings.
- Paphiopedilum are collected in bud for the Têt ( coming tomorrow), Lunar New Year. They will still be collected until extinct, "artificial propagation" or not. P.micranthum, armeniacum and hangianum are collected in big boxes, and the plants in spike are now in clay pots with sand, sold for the New Year as a pot plant. It is the same in Viet Nam or China. Every single plant is collected, and they will always be cheaper than growing the plants for some years. You can get micranthum in bud on the streets for 5000vnd, which is about 0.4$, right now, everywhere in Hanoi.
- All the hangianum blooming size and huonglanae blooming size sold everywhere are wild collected plants that have been cultivated at most for a year or two. Sometimes they are only a couple weeks from the forests, many looks very clean. They are still plentiful, but not for many years, trust me.
- The beautiful pictures of hangianum that are available from Taiwan are from "first bloom from the wild" plants. They import massive quantities of hangianum in bud, bloom them, and award them. With experience it is possible to know which plants are collected and which are not, but the leaves are usually extremely clean. Only the leaf texture and shape can tell that the plants are freshly collected ( and the root system of course, but you cannot unpot, and the pictures never show bare root plants). Wild plants have "fatter, more oily leaves". Hard to explain anyway.
- Those selected plants cannot breed yet. If you self any of those "beautiful" hangianum, the plant will die, and not make any single seeds. They are anyway too weak to carry seeds ( but their pollen can be used of course to make hybrids). Most of the hangianum flasks from "selected parents" are coming from wild collected seed capsules. Hangianum have really an amazingly high count of seed capsules in the wild. Some Taiwanese importers offer triple price for plants with a seed caps.
- I think many people will be disappointed when they will bloom the "seedlings" from "selected parents", because they are random seeds from random plants (and there are many hangianum that are damn ugly, you probably have never seen a complete batch with dog ears and 9cm flowers, but I did. And the plants were absolutely gorgeous, huge leafed). There are many colonies, and many colonies with ugly flowers. Those ugly flowers ( and I know they bloomed a lot like that in Taiwan) are nearly never pictured, so the general thinking of most people is that "hangianum is a beautiful species".
Hien is right for the 3), only add China pot plant market, and that's done.
Most growers in Viet Nam are incredibly bad. I cannot name them growers.
The hangianum are stored in fern root, the samed fern root will be used for 4-5 years ( not joking). Many plants die of anthracnose, they never treat with fungicides ( they do not know what it is, if the plant die it is because of "too much water"), they replenish all the time with plants.
About the artificial propagation, yes, it will lower the request for the hobby market, for most species. Only 2 are problematic, huonglanae and hangianum. Those two species bloom every 2-4 years usually, they are slow growing. If one plant bloom from the wild within a couple of months ( like the selected ones from Taiwan), it is likely to take another 4 years to have a mature growth. So there will always be a demand from breeders to get wild collected plants of those two species.
There are divisions offered of the selected clones from Taiwan, I really wonder how they can do. I have seen one peculiar plant in bloom last year, fresh from the wild. It has been pictured on a taiwanese website. When I have seen that plant, it was a single growth blooming. Yet, two "divisions" have been sold. Guess who's cheating.
For the japanese company, the story ( Javeco) is more complicated. The Japaneses were expecting to get flasks of rare species from Viet Nam, it was a partnership with Mitsubishi (sponsor), and Vegitexco, a state-owned company. Some officials stopped that company from exporting, because some Vietnamese were planning to use it to export wild plants with CITES. They actually used the collecting permits granted by the government to collect massive quantities of paphiopedilum without any trouble from the police, and ship them to China.
Furthermore, the way they grew their plants was not proper. One has to come to Viet Nam (North, there are some excellent growers in the south) to realize how badly the people grow their plants. One cannot even call it "growing".
The plants are full of pests and diseases, and for the 'cheap' plants, like tranlienianum (collected in masses for the pot plant) and helenae, they are just lay down on the ground, and watered like that, more or less bare root. After a while, all the plants become infected, and they use a brush to remove those plants and put the new ones at the same place. I would think that about 80% of all the paphs that are collected die that way in Viet Nam
Paphiopedilum vietnamense is another story. There are still 2 colonies, but the locals want crazy prices to go and collected. They have been cheated in the past, as the first vietnamense were sold to Hanoi dealers for US$5 a kilo. Then they become upset, and as it is the 'rule' in Viet Nam, they started to ask more, and more. Now, the dealers in Hanoi can get 1000 plants from the wild if they want, but at 20$ a plant, so no one does this. The plants are quite protected by those crazy prices. All the others species are still available in huge, huge quantities. So huge that mose sellers sell by 20kg boxes of each species.
And never forget one thing, the hobby market maybe tampers with wild populations, but the pot-plant market currently destroys many more plants than the connoissor's market.
The story is the same as kovachii actually, but there is a general misinterpretation of the whole kovachii story. Most of the kovachii, like the hangianum, went to the local market for pot-plant 'nice flowers'. There are some stocks as far as I know, one in Taiwan ( about 200 plants), and three in South America, two huge stocks made by Ecuadorean nursery and Peruvian nursery, because they though they had a beautiful huge market later. Crazy people... In Europe, absolutely no "huge stocks". I have to know about that. I know only 3 people who have blooming size wild collected kovachii in Europe, a few plants each ( 2-3). I tried to locate some mature plants a couple years ago, everything was available in Europe, including wentworthianum, zieckianum, multigrowth sanderianum from the wild. But no kovachii blooming size. So it is not a matter of 'trust' that no one came up to offer me those plants, just that they were not where they were expected by many people to be.
The real sequel of the kovachii story is that there is NO DEMAND from hobbyists for many wild collected plants, because, there are not that many orchid hobbyists, that's as simple as that. In Europe, maybe 100 hobbyists want to get kovachii, in the USA, let's say 200. There is no market for large quantities, except for pot-plant. Some people want to select high quality kovachii, so they will import a batch. Other than that...
About CITES and flasks of hangianum or other new species. The USA ruled that the parent plants must be legal to own. The CITES did it on one 'standing commitee' occurence, if I remember well. Anyway, one government asked me to study that and see if paphiopedilum flasks from the new species are forbidden or allowed under CITES regulations. I came up with the following: According to CITES regulations, paph hangianum and other new species flasks are completely legal, no matter if the parents are collected in a national park or otherwise.
The CITES people that edited the appendixes made a deadly mistake:
http://www.cites.org/eng/app/appendices.shtml
If you look carefully, on top of the Appendix I Paphiopedilu and Phragmipedium
" For all of the following Appendix-I species, seedling or tissue cultures obtained in vitro, in solid or liquid media, transported in sterile containers are not subject to the provisions of the Convention)"
You have a flask of paphiopedilum hangianum in front of you. You want to check if there is anything related to CITES matter. You open the appendix to check if paphiopedilum hangianum is Appendix I, Appendix II, or free trade. You read the above sentence in the core text of the appendix ( no mention of "artificial propagated", just "seedling or tissue culture obtained in vitro"). You close the CITES website, all the garbage about artificial propagation or otherwise is USELESS, because that flask is not 'subject to the provisions of the Convention'.
I am sure that law enforcement officers can try to seize flasks of hangianum, but I think that in front of a court, there is little to no risks for the seller. If some people were more careful when writing text, they would NEVER have put such a stupid sentence in the Appendix. That single sentence cancels all CITES related matter for all Paphiopedilum flasks.