Papua New Guinean agarwood

Papua New Guinea is the newest origin covered in this hub by a wide margin. Where Vietnam and India have centuries of documented trade, PNG's agarwood industry dates only from the late 1990s. Before buyers arrived, researchers note, the tree had no recognised cultural or commercial importance to the communities whose forests it grew in.

Much of the detailed documentation comes from field work carried out soon after the trade began, so several figures below describe the early 2000s. They are given with their dates and should be read as a picture of how the trade started rather than how it looks now.

Gaharu and eaglewood

PNG's trade uses the same vocabulary as the Indonesian and Southeast Asian markets it feeds into. Gaharu is the usual trade word, and eaglewood is widely used in PNG documents and conservation work. Both refer to the resinous wood, not to a particular grade.

Gyrinops ledermannii: the species behind PNG's trade

Gyrinops ledermannii is the species identified from herbarium specimens collected in the main trading areas of East Sepik and Sandaun, and some studies describe it as the only agarwood species confirmed in PNG. When harvesting first began, PNG authorities assumed the trade species was Aquilaria filaria, which is recorded across the border in Indonesian Papua. That makes PNG the one origin in this hub built mainly on Gyrinops rather than Aquilaria, covered in Aquilaria vs Gyrinops.

Like other agarwood trees, it forms resin through the process described in how agarwood resin forms, and like the rest of its genus it has been listed in CITES Appendix II since the 2004 conference.

A trade that began in the late 1990s

According to a TRAFFIC study, enquiries about agarwood trees reached the herbarium in Lae in the mid 1990s, organised trade began in Sandaun province in 1997, and trade from East Sepik followed in 1998. Asian buyers operated from the provincial centres of Vanimo and Wewak.

Anecdotal reports at the time also pointed to agarwood-producing trees in Gulf, Manus, Madang, Western Province and New Britain, but the documented trade was concentrated in the Sepik region.

Early exports and prices

Official National Forest Service figures recorded nearly four tonnes of agarwood exported between October 1999 and March 2001, valued at about USD 827,000, an average of roughly USD 207 per kilogram. A middleman reported a single ten-tonne shipment in November 2000, which suggests official figures understated the real volume. Singapore was believed to be the most common destination for large shipments, with smaller amounts reported crossing illegally into Indonesian Papua.

The same study recorded a cautionary detail: villagers had been told that a plant called "puk-puk gaharu," Phaleria macrocarpa, was a low grade of gaharu. It is not an agarwood species at all, an early example of the misidentification that runs through the trade and is covered in fake oud: what to look for.

Harvest pressure

The trade's speed left its mark on the forest. In sample plots in the Hunstein Range of East Sepik, surveyed in 2001, between 12 and 39 percent of G. ledermannii trees over five centimetres in diameter had been cut down in the search for gaharu. At the time no harvest or export quotas had been set, and PNG's CITES Management Authority had never issued a CITES permit for gaharu species, since the genus had not yet been listed.

Management and cultivation

Conservation and forestry groups have since worked on managing the trade rather than stopping it. WWF reports a plan for an Eaglewood Management Area intended to protect at least 200,000 hectares of agarwood forest habitat, with management teams working directly with rural agarwood farmers, and a TRAFFIC study it supported found agarwood raising village incomes by up to tenfold in some areas.

Cultivation is also being tested. A training and research programme involving the Rainforest Project Foundation, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and PNG's National Forest Service and Forest Research Institute has run pilot demonstration sites in Central, East Sepik, Enga and Gulf provinces.

PNG agarwood in the market today

PNG agarwood remains a smaller and less documented part of the market than the older origins in this hub, and much of it has historically moved through intermediaries rather than under a PNG label. Buyers seeing PNG or Gyrinops ledermannii claims should apply the same standard as for every origin: ask how the seller knows, whether the wood is wild or cultivated, and what export paperwork exists. See questions to ask before you buy oud.