We have been crestfallen to witness firsthand that Mr. Ananda, the person behind Oud Yusuf, is now the proud proprietor of a number of hectares of Durian timber.
“So, what about my subsequent Oud Yusuf batch?” I requested him.
“We’d like at the least 5 years,” he mentioned.
The timber are uninfected as of but, as a consequence of labor shortages and the logistical calls for of his bustling durian enterprise. He’s promoting a lot durian, he doesn’t have the time or manpower to handle his agarwood timber.
Plus, with the pandemic, we virtually dropped the ball on him. He, like different colleagues, noticed our new forays into the world of artisanal perfumery and principally gave up hope and adopted the Durian hype. I don’t blame them – I wouldn’t have waited for me eternally both.
However it wasn’t simply us…
With the collapse it confronted through the Lockdown, plantation agarwood is probably going to not get well for many years.
It’s stunning to learn how lots of the bigshots within the Thailand distillation scene are not distilling. And from those which can be left, one of many largest names within the enterprise now solely has ~16% of the timber he began out with left.
He has no time to attend for brand new saplings to change into even younger crassnas, so he’s not planting any agarwood. The identical is true for the others, most of whom have already cleared out their dwindling agarwood land to develop durian or mangosteen as an alternative.
This doesn’t imply there’s no oud oil going round. Fairly the opposite, Trat is flowing – however flowing with what precisely? (And also you’d be shocked by how a lot of it results in China and Taiwan…)
I predict that there’ll be a decline within the subsequent ten years the place even good plantation agarwood turns into as scarce as wild oud now’s.
