CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, is the international treaty that governs cross-border trade in agarwood today. It does not ban the agarwood trade. It regulates it, through a permit system intended to keep commercial harvest from pushing wild populations toward extinction. This guide explains what that system actually requires, what it exempts, and how it connects to the conservation picture covered briefly in our guides to wild vs plantation agarwood and the history of agarwood trade.
Because this is a regulatory subject, rules and thresholds are updated periodically by CITES and by individual national authorities. Treat the specific figures below as a reliable general framework, and confirm current requirements with the relevant CITES Management Authority or customs agency before shipping, importing, or travelling with agarwood.
What Is CITES, and Why Does It Cover Agarwood?
CITES is a multilateral treaty, first agreed in 1973, that regulates international trade in species considered at risk from that trade. It works through a tiered Appendix system. Appendix I covers species facing the most severe threat, where commercial international trade is essentially prohibited. Appendix II covers species that are not necessarily on the brink of extinction but could become threatened without trade controls, and it is this second tier that applies to agarwood. Appendix II does not stop trade. It requires that trade be tracked, permitted, and assessed for sustainability.
How Agarwood Came Under CITES Protection
Agarwood's CITES history happened in two stages. In 1994, India submitted a proposal to list Aquilaria malaccensis, at the time the most heavily traded agarwood species, under Appendix II. The proposal was accepted and took effect on 16 February 1995, the first time any agarwood-producing species was placed under binding international trade controls.
That left other agarwood-producing species, including several other Aquilaria species and the entire Gyrinops genus, outside CITES protection for nearly a decade, even though they were subject to the same market pressure. This gap was closed at the thirteenth Conference of the Parties, held in Bangkok in 2004, when a proposal led by Indonesia extended Appendix II coverage to every species in both the Aquilaria and Gyrinops genera. Since 2004, no agarwood-producing species can be legally traded internationally outside the CITES permit system.
What Appendix II Actually Covers, and What It Doesn't
The Aquilaria and Gyrinops listing carries what CITES calls an annotation, a set of technical notes specifying exactly which parts, products, and derivatives the listing applies to. In practical terms, raw wood, wood chips, powder, and oil are all controlled and require permits to move across borders. The annotation also sets out specific exclusions: seeds, pollen, and certain tissue cultures transported in sterile containers are not controlled, and finished retail products that are already in a form ready for sale to, or use by, the general public are generally treated as outside the core permitting requirement, though national authorities can and do interpret this differently in practice.
This distinction matters more than it might first appear. A kilogram of raw agarwood chips and a bottle of agarwood-based perfume sitting on a shelf are not necessarily treated the same way by customs authorities, even though both ultimately derive from the same protected genera.
Permits and Non-Detriment Findings: How Legal Trade Works
For trade that does fall under the core permitting requirement, the exporting country's CITES Management Authority issues an export permit for each shipment. Before doing so, that country's CITES Scientific Authority is required to make what is called a non-detriment finding, a formal determination that the proposed export will not harm the species' survival in the wild. Permits are shipment-specific rather than open-ended licences, and they typically specify the species, quantity, product form, and the exporter and importer involved. Many importing countries also require a matching import permit or formal notification before the shipment is allowed to clear customs.
Bringing Agarwood Home: The Personal Effects Exemption
Travellers carrying small, personal quantities of agarwood are generally not expected to obtain a CITES permit, under a personal and household effects exemption set out in CITES Resolution Conf. 13.7. As currently framed, this exemption covers up to 1 kilogram of wood chips, 24 millilitres of oil, and two sets of beads, prayer beads, necklaces, or bracelets per person, provided the material consists of dead specimens or finished products rather than live plant material.
This is a general international framework rather than a guarantee of smooth passage through every border. Individual countries implement and enforce it differently, and thresholds, documentation expectations, and customs practice can change. Anyone travelling internationally with agarwood products beyond casual personal use, or carrying anything close to these limits, should confirm current requirements with customs authorities in both the country of departure and the destination before travelling.
How Threatened Is Wild Agarwood, Really?
The conservation case behind these regulations is well documented. The IUCN Red List currently assesses Aquilaria malaccensis as Critically Endangered, citing an estimated decline of more than 80 percent in its population over the last three generations. The same assessment describes the species as extinct in the wild in India and nearly extinct in East Kalimantan, two regions that were historically significant sources of wild agarwood. Other Aquilaria and Gyrinops species carry their own, separately assessed conservation statuses, but the pattern across the genus is broadly consistent: sustained demand for wild material has driven serious, well-documented decline.
This is also precisely why plantation cultivation has expanded so substantially across producing countries over the past two decades, a shift covered in detail in our guide to wild vs plantation agarwood.
What This Means When You're Buying
For most buyers, CITES is less about paperwork they personally need to file and more about a basic legitimacy check on the seller. Agarwood being moved across borders in any meaningful commercial quantity should be backed by proper documentation somewhere in the supply chain, even if that documentation never reaches the end customer directly. Sellers who are vague or dismissive about sourcing and legality, particularly for wild-labelled material, are a meaningful red flag, a subject covered in full in our guides to quality and authenticity and the buying guide.