Agarwood by Region: A Comparison Guide

This hub has covered eight regional origins individually: Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, India, Laos, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea, alongside the foundational guide to the two genera, Aquilaria and Gyrinops, that produce agarwood in all of them. Taken individually, each guide answers "what's documented about this country's agarwood." This guide answers a different question: how do these origins actually compare once you put them side by side.

How to Use This Comparison

Nothing in this guide is new research. Every fact below is drawn directly from, and should be read alongside, the regional guide it summarises. Where this guide adds value is in the comparison itself: seeing that Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos all depend on the same species, or that three different countries each run their own separate CITES permitting authority, is easier to take in side by side than spread across eight separate articles. If a summary line here raises a question, the linked regional guide is where the full detail and sourcing context live.

Species and Genus, Country by Country

Most of the eight origins in this hub turn out to depend on one of just two species. Aquilaria crassna is the dominant species across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, three neighbouring mainland Southeast Asian countries that share both the species and large parts of its regional supply chain. Aquilaria malaccensis is the dominant species in Assam, India, and is also one of five Aquilaria species documented in Malaysia, alongside a presence in western Indonesia.

Indonesia stands apart as the most species-diverse origin by a wide margin, hosting roughly 15 of the world's 21 recognised Aquilaria species and 7 of its 9 recognised Gyrinops species, split conventionally into a western "Malaccensis group" and an eastern "Filaria group." Papua New Guinea is the one origin in this hub built primarily around a Gyrinops species rather than an Aquilaria one: Gyrinops ledermannii anchors its commercial trade, alongside smaller documented populations of other Gyrinops species and Aquilaria filaria. The full genus-level picture, including how cleanly Aquilaria and Gyrinops actually separate at the genetic level, is covered in our foundational Aquilaria vs Gyrinops guide.

What Each Region Calls Agarwood

Regional naming is one of the more confusing parts of agarwood for new buyers, partly because the same word sometimes crosses borders and partly because individual countries use multiple names for different grades or contexts. Vietnam uses trầm hương as its general term, with kỳ nam reserved for a distinct, rarer top category rather than simply the highest grade of ordinary trầm hương. Cambodia calls the tree chan crassna and its resin chankrosna. Laos uses mai ketsana, combining "wood" with the Lao word for agarwood, a name also recognised in parts of Thailand. Assam uses sasi, sanchi, and agaru interchangeably, with agaru sharing a direct root with the Sanskrit aguru.

"Gaharu" is the term that travels furthest: it is used as the general word for agarwood in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea alike, reflecting a shared Malay-language trade history across the archipelago. Malaysia additionally uses karas specifically for the tree itself. Papua New Guinea's trade documentation also uses "eaglewood" alongside gaharu, a term that appears occasionally elsewhere in the trade as a general synonym for agarwood.

Wild Harvest vs Plantation, Region by Region

How much of each origin's trade still comes from wild trees, versus deliberately cultivated and inoculated plantation stock, varies considerably and is one of the more practically useful comparisons for buyers, covered in general terms in our guide to wild vs plantation agarwood. Vietnam banned wild Aquilaria crassna harvest domestically in 1992 and now exports almost entirely plantation-grown material. Cambodia and Laos have followed a broadly similar path, driven by the same species' steep wild decline rather than identical legislation. Assam's Aquilaria malaccensis is formally assessed as extinct in the wild within India, making its homestead agroforestry model effectively the entire legal supply.

Indonesia and Malaysia sit further toward the wild-harvest end of the spectrum than the other origins covered here, with both countries' export volumes historically including a meaningful share of wild-sourced material alongside expanding plantation cultivation, and both relying on quota systems specifically because wild harvest remains part of the legal trade. Papua New Guinea is the newest entrant and the hardest to place on this spectrum: its trade began as wild harvest in the late 1990s, and structured sustainable-harvest frameworks like the Eaglewood Management Area concept are still being built out rather than already mature.

Conservation Status Across All Eight Origins

Every dominant species covered in this hub carries IUCN threatened status, though the timeline and severity differ. Aquilaria crassna, the species behind Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, was assessed Critically Endangered in 2018 with an estimated decline of more than 80 percent over three generations. Aquilaria malaccensis, the species behind Assam and a meaningful share of Malaysian and Indonesian production, followed a similar trajectory but on a longer documented timeline: an initial Vulnerable assessment in 2002, upgraded to Critically Endangered in 2018, with the added distinction of being described as extinct in the wild specifically within India.

Two of this hub's species carry conservation stories shaped by sheer rarity rather than trade volume alone. Aquilaria rostrata, found only in Peninsular Malaysia, was believed extinct for roughly a century before its 2015 rediscovery, and remains Critically Endangered today. Gyrinops ledermannii, Papua New Guinea's main commercial species, is assessed as Endangered, a less severe category than Critically Endangered but still indicating a clear, documented population concern less than three decades after the species entered formal trade.

CITES and Domestic Legal Frameworks Compared

All eight origins sit under the same international framework: Aquilaria malaccensis was the first agarwood species listed under CITES Appendix II, in 1995, and the rest of Aquilaria along with the entire Gyrinops genus followed in 2004, detailed in our guide to agarwood and CITES. What differs sharply is how each country implements that framework domestically. Vietnam layered its own Decree 18/HĐBT wild-harvest ban on top of CITES in 1992, predating the international listing by over a decade. India introduced domestic export restrictions in 1991, ahead of its own 1994 CITES proposal. Indonesia runs one of the most institutionally developed systems covered in this hub, splitting scientific assessment (historically LIPI, now BRIN) from quota issuance (the forestry ministry's PHKA directorate), coordinated alongside an exporter association, ASGARIN.

Malaysia is the most administratively fragmented origin in this hub: Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah, and Sarawak each manage their own CITES permitting separately, with a 2007 national quota split 180,000 kilograms between Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah and 20,000 kilograms for Sarawak, and with Sabah historically not requiring the same export permits the other two jurisdictions do. Laos distributes harvest quota through Regional Forest Offices rather than a single national body, and remains under active CITES compliance scrutiny, with the CITES Secretariat requesting clarification on Lao Aquilaria crassna trade records as recently as 2023. Papua New Guinea, the newest origin, has comparatively little domestic quota infrastructure by comparison, leaning instead on emerging conservation tools like the Eaglewood Management Area concept.

Trade Scale and History: Old Origins, New Origins

The eight origins in this hub span an enormous range of trade maturity. Vietnam's documented agarwood trade reaches back to a royal monopoly in the 1580s and is, by volume, the world's largest agarwood exporter today, with Vietnam Customs reporting more than 8,000 tonnes exported in 2021. Assam's trade is similarly old in cultural terms, and its CITES history specifically reaches back to 1995, the earliest international regulation any agarwood species received. Indonesia and Malaysia both have long-established, large-scale industries, though run on more wild-harvest-dependent models than Vietnam's.

At the opposite end, Laos functions more as a supply conduit into its neighbours' branded export markets than as a globally recognised origin name in its own right, despite producing the same species as Vietnam and Cambodia. Papua New Guinea is the clear outlier on trade age: its entire documented agarwood industry began in 1998, with export reporting to Singapore starting just a year later, making it, by a wide margin, the youngest origin covered anywhere in this hub.

For buyers, this spread in trade maturity has a practical implication. Older, larger-volume origins like Vietnam and Indonesia tend to have more established grading conventions and more documentation infrastructure to check against, while newer or smaller-volume origins like Laos and Papua New Guinea have comparatively thin retail-level documentation, simply because the trade hasn't had as long to develop standardised practice. The same underlying principle applies across every origin in this hub regardless of age or scale: seller documentation matters more than regional naming alone, a point covered in full in our guides to quality and authenticity and the buying guide.