Are Aromatic Resins Sustainable? Frankincense, Benzoin and the Smallholder Problem

Aromatic resins are sustainable to very different degrees depending on the species and the harvest system behind them, not as a category. Benzoin, from cultivated and semi-wild Styrax benzoin and Styrax tonkinensis trees grown on smallholder land in Sumatra and Laos, is harvested in ways that do not require intact forest and can continue for decades on the same trees. Frankincense is a harder case: most commercial Boswellia resin still comes from wild trees tapped on communal or open-access land in the Horn of Africa and Arabia, where demand has risen faster than tree populations can regenerate. The honest answer is that benzoin’s supply chain is comparatively resilient because it is already a farming system, while frankincense’s is a wild-harvest economy showing real signs of strain, and the two should not be discussed as one problem.

What makes an aromatic resin “sustainable” in the first place?

Sustainability in this trade turns on three separate questions that are often collapsed into one. First, does tapping kill or permanently weaken the tree? Second, is the tree part of a managed system, such as an agroforestry plot, or is it wild and effectively open-access? Third, does enough of the sale price reach the person who cut the bark, so that they have an incentive to tap carefully and leave rest periods rather than strip every available tree each season?

A resin can score well on the biology and badly on the economics, or the reverse. Frankincense (olibanum) is the clearest example of a resin where all three questions currently have troubling answers in parts of its range.

Frankincense: a boom market straining wild Boswellia trees

Global demand for frankincense has grown steadily, driven by the wellness and incense markets as well as traditional uses in the Gulf, the Horn of Africa and East Asia. Most of that resin still comes from wild trees: Boswellia papyrifera in Ethiopia and Sudan, Boswellia sacra in Oman and Somalia, and Boswellia carterii and Boswellia frereana across the same region.

Field studies from Ethiopia have documented population decline in B. papyrifera woodlands linked to intensive tapping, livestock browsing on seedlings, and conversion of woodland to farmland. Trees are tapped by making shallow incisions that trigger a defensive resin flow; done with rest intervals, this is survivable indefinitely, but tapping every tree in a stand every year, sometimes started too early in a tree’s life, leaves fewer trees producing resin over time and very little natural regeneration coming up behind them.

Benzoin: a smallholder crop already inside a farming system

Benzoin looks structurally different from the outset. How benzoin is harvested describes trees tapped on land that smallholder families already manage, often planted deliberately in upland rice fallows in Laos or interplanted with other crops in Sumatra, rather than found and cut from remote wild stands. Laos and the Siam benzoin trade traces how this system has supplied European perfumery for well over a century without the population collapses documented in Boswellia woodlands.

That does not make benzoin risk-free. The trade depends on farm-gate prices high enough to keep households tapping carefully rather than switching to faster, cruder methods, or abandoning the trees for other crops entirely when benzoin prices fall relative to rubber, coffee or rice. The resin itself, Siam benzoin and Sumatra benzoin, remains a byproduct of an existing agricultural landscape rather than an extraction from wild forest, which is the main structural reason its outlook is steadier.

Is frankincense at risk of running out?

No Boswellia species is currently listed as globally threatened by the IUCN, and frankincense is not disappearing from the market in the near term. But “not extinct” and “sustainably harvested” are different claims. Multiple regional surveys report tapping intensities well above levels needed for stand recovery, ageing tree populations with few young replacements, and increasing pressure on the most productive, easiest-to-reach trees near roads and settlements.

The practical risk is not a sudden global shortage but a slow shift in what is available: more resin from younger, harder-tapped trees, more pressure on remaining accessible stands as the best ones are exhausted, and rising prices for the highest grades as premium material becomes scarcer relative to demand.

What does a sustainable resin supply chain actually look like?

For a wild-harvested resin like frankincense, the elements that field researchers and forestry agencies point to are consistent: rest years between tapping cycles, a cap on the number of incisions per tree per season, protection of seedlings from grazing livestock, and land tenure arrangements that give the people who tap the trees a long-term stake in the woodland rather than open, first-come access.

For benzoin, the equivalent list is shorter and more economic than ecological: fair, transparent pricing back to tappers, market demand for the mid and lower grades so that the whole harvest has a buyer rather than only the best almonds, and continued interest from perfumery and incense that keeps the crop worth maintaining at all.

Certification, price and the smallholder’s dilemma

Neither frankincense nor benzoin has a widely adopted, resin-specific sustainability certification comparable to what exists for coffee or cacao. Attempts to formalize sustainable tapping quotas for Boswellia have been proposed by conservation and forestry researchers, but enforcement across scattered, often informal harvesting grounds in low-income regions is difficult.

The underlying tension is the same one that runs through most non-timber forest products: the people doing the tapping are usually smallholders or landless harvesters earning a small fraction of the retail price paid for essential oils or resinoid at the other end of the chain. When prices are squeezed, the incentive runs toward maximizing this season’s yield rather than protecting next decade’s trees. Raising and stabilizing the price paid at the point of harvest is, in most analyses of this trade, a more realistic lever than certification schemes that struggle to reach dispersed rural tappers.

Where does this leave buyers and perfumers?

Anyone sourcing frankincense or benzoin for incense, perfumery or research is buying into two different sustainability stories at once, even within a single blend such as those described in Resins in perfumery or How to build an amber accord. Benzoin can generally be treated as a stable, renewable agricultural product tied to smallholder livelihoods that benefit from continued demand. Frankincense deserves more scrutiny: asking a supplier which Boswellia species, which region, and whether tapping quotas are observed is a reasonable question, and one the trade is only slowly getting better at answering. The Guide to natural resins is a useful starting point for understanding how these harvest systems differ across the wider resin trade before assuming any one material’s supply is secure by default.

• sustainability
• frankincense
• benzoin
• boswellia
• harvesting