Ignorance leads to losses in agarwood industry

ALOR SETAR: The karas tree produces a valuable national commodity called agarwood (gaharu), which price can go up to tens of thousands of ringgit a kilogramme.

However, in order to extract the valuable resin of agarwood from the karas tree, it has to be wounded first.

“Other trees may only produce when it is healthy but the karas is different. It will only produce (the resin) if it is injured or damaged. The longer the tree stays damaged or infected with illness, the better the quality of agarwood produced,” said Ramli Harun, 67, who has been managing two karas tree plantations since 1990.

His plantations are in Pokok Sena and Jalan Hutan Kampung, both in Alor Setar. Bernama had the opportunity to interview him during a programme organised by the Malaysian Timber Industry Board (MTIB) recently.

Ramli said that infected karas trees will experience cell death and the reaction to fight the infection will result in the production of agarwood resin.

There were two methods to injure a tree in order to produce the reaction. Trees could be injured naturally (struck by lightning, insect or bacterial infection, crushed by other trees) or artificially through human acts like hacking at the tree to expose the bark, tying the trunk with a wire or inoculating it with fungi.

“Injuring the tree via inoculation has been proven to be fastest in inducing agarwood formation.

“The chances of karas producing agarwood through inoculation is 90 percent,” he revealed.

The Kuala Setar-born Ramli has been in the agarwood business for 20 years and says that inoculation usually takes place when the karas tree has matured, at between five and 10 years old with a trunk circumference of at least 15cm.

Each tree would then be drilled with a hole about six inches wide for the vaccine to be injected in. The number of holes drilled is subject to the girth and height of the karas tree.

“Agarwood would form about a year after inoculation. We can then proceed to chopping down the tree and extracting the agarwood oil from it,” he explained.

Ramli has two factories that process agarwood oil on a small scale in Langkawi and Alor Setar.

“A 12mm bottle of agarwood essential oil costs RM500 while the one-litre bottle costs RM41,000.

“It is expensive owing to the difficulty in extracting agarwood oil. Despite its price, there is always demand, particularly from the Middle Eastern countries. However, the supply is never enough,” he said.

Ramli said there were times when he had had to source agarwood supply from others in order to meet demands, which could not be fulfilled by his 0.1 hectare-sized plantations.

He has difficulty finding a source of supply, however, because majority of agarwood farmers did not know that karas trees needed to be wounded to produce agarwood. This further contributes to the poor supply.

“We are only able to produce about 2.5 litres of essential oil every month but the demand exceeds our supply. So we try sourcing from other farmers but found that many had little idea of what they were doing. They had assumed that they could get rich merely by planting karas and then harvesting it.

“They had thought that they could sell a tree for RM2,000RM3,000. But when we inspect the trees, we found that they were not producing agarwood because they had not been wounded, so how can they expect to sell the trees?” he said.

Agarwood is prized for its oil which does not only smell good, but is said to have medicinal properties. It is used in perfumes, medicines, cosmetics, food and religious products.

Demand is particularly high in countries like Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).