Laotian agarwood

Laos sits in the middle of the Aquilaria crassna belt, bordered by Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, and it shares the same species and much of the same history as its neighbours. Where it differs is its place in the trade. Laos has supplied large amounts of agarwood, but a good share of it has historically left the country as raw wood bought by foreign traders, so the name "Laotian oud" is less established than "Vietnamese" or "Cambodian."

Aquilaria crassna in Laos

The main agarwood species in Laos is Aquilaria crassna, the same species covered in Vietnamese agarwood and Cambodian agarwood. It forms resin through the wound-and-infection process described in how agarwood resin forms, and nothing about the tree changes at the border. It is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List.

The harvest boom

The best documented account of the Lao trade comes from a survey of harvesters and traders carried out between 2003 and 2005 by researchers from the University of Copenhagen. It found that commercial harvesting began in 1975 and 1976, among Vietnamese veterans in Laos's southern provinces, and spread across the country through the 1980s. The first distillation plants opened in 1997, and their number peaked at around 80 in 1998 and 1999.

The scale was considerable. The researchers estimated roughly 6,300 local, part-time harvesters, about 1,600 professional Lao harvesters working away from home, and around 350 Vietnamese harvesters. By the time of the survey they saw clear signs of over-harvesting, and the trade had been declining since 2003.

A supplier to its neighbours

The same study found that agarwood harvested in Laos was largely taken to Vietnam and sold to Vietnamese traders, who connected it to the international market. More recent analysis of CITES and customs data from 2010 to 2020 still lists Laos among the main sources of agarwood chips and powder, the forms that make up more than 80 percent of global agarwood trade.

For buyers, this has a practical consequence. Some agarwood sold under another country's name may well have grown in Laos, and some sold as Laotian may not have. Because the species is the same on both sides of the border, there is no way to tell from the wood itself. The wider routes of the trade are covered in the history of agarwood trade.

Licences and CITES

In the early 2000s, Lao law gave licensed wholesalers the sole right to buy and process agarwood harvested in their districts, which made much of the trade between provinces technically illegal. The Copenhagen survey counted 45 legal and 10 illegal wholesalers. Rules may have changed since, so treat this as a picture of how the trade was organised rather than a current legal guide.

Internationally, A. crassna has been listed in CITES Appendix II since every Aquilaria species was added at the 2004 conference, so commercial export needs CITES permits. Laos has also been subject to a broader CITES compliance process covering its wildlife trade, and its CITES authorities have taken part in regional agarwood workshops. The permit system is covered in agarwood and CITES explained.

Wild scarcity and plantations

When the Copenhagen researchers wrote up their findings in 2008, all Lao supply still came from natural forest, and they doubted that cultivation would produce agarwood in commercial quantities. Plantation growing of A. crassna has since spread across the region, as covered in wild vs plantation agarwood. One caution applies here as in Cambodia: a recent regional restoration project reports that most plantations in Cambodia and Laos rely on seed sourced from Thailand, with little or no checking of species identity.

Laotian agarwood in the market today

Agarwood sold explicitly as Laotian is less common than Vietnamese, Cambodian or Indonesian material. Where a seller does make a Laotian origin claim, the same standard applies as for every other origin in this hub: the name is a claim, and the useful questions are how the seller knows, whether the wood is plantation or wild, and what export paperwork exists. See questions to ask before you buy oud.