CITES??? What's that? It would seem as if no one has heard about it, I've mentioned it several times in past discussion elsewhere. The only thing I can surmise is CITES, inoculation and inoculation kits, plantation/cultivation efforts, reports from those who actually hunt like Taha, countless articles and documentaries about arrests, shootings, smuggling, etc, point to an abundance of wild agarwood rather than agarwood depletion by the way some choose to ignore the state of affairs. Seems like an exercise in futility to try to show or prove otherwise. Reminds me of some old, big tune lyrics by Buju(free Gargamel), "
Who say that big man don't cry, you'll never miss your water til the well runs dry".
And speaking of the market, there's some things that I've noticed and please regard me if I'm seeing it wrong. What I've noticed is that the majority of the "wild" oils are coming from areas that I consider the last bastions of wild agarwood, places like Malaysia and Sri Lanka, and I see prices creeping up on those as well. Are there still some wild Hindi, Cambodian and don't even mention Vietnam, Burma, Bhutan; yes. But those are few in comparison with the aforementioned regions and IMO likely either old, aged oils or new ones from old stockpiles of wood rather than from fresh felled agarwood. I don't hunt wild agarwood bro, so I could be wrong, but that's how it appears. There are just as many organic/cultivated Hindi oils in the market as wild, excepting for a few guys that make it there business to "find" those old stocks or have aged oils.
Also, as a consumer I try to look at the market from a vendors perspective. What I see occurring more are oils that I call "cook and release" oils. What I mean by that is that it seems the norm is for distillers to distill oils and put them to sale with only curing and no aging or minimal aging at best. That is not in and of itself a problem per se as most of us know a little about proper storage and can age the oils ourselves. But, it does beg the question about long term sustainability and consistently offering products when a vendor may have little to no evident stockpile of a depleting material. We can assume that the artisan vendors have stash away oils, but with all of the "cook and release" oils, is that really the case? It also begs the question of predictability of what the oil will become, will time shows flaws or fitness? Is the freshness masking some inherent inferiorities of the wood used? Did I just buy a dud spud or is this oil really the greater potato?
When I look at the catalogs, as well as what I see in discussion of the big ME houses, I have to ask, why are there no more same quality Kalakassi's and Thaqeel's? Some possible answers are that the same quality of wood is not available, and if it is available it's in short supply where its use in composition with other lower grades of wood has to be rationed, thereby lowering the quality of the final product, hence the current Kalakassi and Thaqeel/Kannam or whatever they call it, where they go as far as showing us the percentage on their product page. If there is an abundance, why not use 100%? Furthermore, as far as I know the new "diluted" ones are in the same price range as the old good ones. To be cont.....
