- Between 1999 to 2011, the Bangladesh Forest Department created 4,822 hectares (11,915 acres) of agarwood plantations across the country with local beneficiaries carrying out the clearing of forest land and planting and maintenance of the plantations.
- Agarwood trees take 6-8 years to mature. However, even the older trees from these plantations have not been auctioned since plantation.
- Agarwood and attar (agar perfume) exports from Bangladesh have seen unsteady profits over the last few years.
- Now, there are too many agar plantations in the country while the size of the local perfume industry remains small, and planters wait for buyers.
Standing precariously on the slope of a tree-covered hill in Kaptai National Park in southeast Bangladesh, Mohammad Musa was clearing bushes with a machete. Our eyes widened in shock when he ran the machete over a couple of 2.4-meter-tall (8-foot-tall), healthy young fig plants that stuck their heads out of the bushes.
“These will attract mama,” he murmured. “See what this garden has become with all this nonsense.”
Local Bengalis call elephants mama (maternal uncle) out of fear and respect, just like people living around the Sundarbans call tigers mama.
The native wildlife-supporting fig plants are ‘nonsense’ to Musa because they grew on the edge of his agarwood (Aquilaria spp.) plantation, or garden as he calls it, planted on a 2-hectare (5-acre) piece of land in the national park in Kaptai upazila (sub-district) in Rangamati Hill district.
Between 1998 and 2011, the Bangladesh Forest Department undertook two projects to create a total of 4,822 hectares (11,915 acres) of agarwood monoculture plantations in five divisions of the Forest Department.
In the second project, from 2007 to 2011, 443 hectares (1,095 acres) of agarwood plantation was established in Kaptai National Park, according to official data gathered from the Management Planning Unit of the Forest Department. Musa is one of the local beneficiaries who cleared the forest patches and created the monoculture to earn revenue.
The plantations are established under a participatory social forestry approach involving beneficiaries from local communities who plant and manage approved tree species on degraded forests and public lands according to the Social Forestry Rules (2004).
According to the agarwood trading regulations set in 2012, agarwood plantations should be considered suitable for inoculation after eight years or when 80% of the trees reach the circumference of 0.45 m (1.5 ft) at chest height. Although some of the plantations are now 27 years old, they have not been auctioned yet. Musa’s garden is 18 years old.
Agarwood inoculation process involves nailing or drilling the tree and introduction of a fungus or chemical agent into these wounds to stimulate the tree’s immune system, which in turn leads to the creation of a dark, aromatic resin — the essence used in making perfume.
We first visited Musa’s plantation in February 2025, when he vented out frustration about not being able to sell his agar plants.
“The forest department encouraged us to grow this plant, but now they are doing nothing to harvest the agar,” the planter, originally a teaseller, said.
“See, I’m clearing the jungle to get a good harvest. Meanwhile, my shop is closed for three days. I could have done business worth 2,500-3,000 takas [$20-25] each day from the shop,” he added, expressing disappointment.
Musa said he had spent more than 1,000,000 takas ($8,100) to create the plantation. Employing laborers to clear the bushes is expensive, so he does it himself occasionally.
According to agarwood trading regulations, agar plantations planted on forest lands can only be sold through open auction or sealed tenders.
A long overdue harvest
Have the Forest Department forgotten their agar plantations?
Mongabay reached out to Amir Hosain Chowdhury, chief conservator of forests at the Forest Department, to inquire about their plans regarding the agarwood plantations in April last year.
“We will stocktake and assess the plantations and then make a decision on it,” Amir Hosain said back then.
We decided to wait for the process to begin.
Fast forward to March 2026, only one forest division — Rangamati — has marked its agar trees across 403 hectares (996 acres) of the 443-hectare (1,095-acre) plantations for inoculation and called for tender, according to Md Mahmudul Hasan, assistant chief conservator of forests at the Forest Department’s Management Planning Unit.
The auction is yet to take place.
While it is still a relief for Musa, his frustrations lie much deeper.
“I grew over 1,000 agar plants in my garden. They could have been harvested 12 years back. In the course of time, many of my trees died — due to storms, due to fires. People set fire to dry leaves, and the agar trees die in heat,” he said.
“Now I have 230 plants left. The forest department has marked 170 of them to be eligible for inoculation now,” Musa added.
Musa now wants to “sell” his plantation. While an allotted plantation cannot be sold, it appears that ownerships do change hands in exchange for money, and it is a common practice in the area.
An industry disconnect
Musa is one of the luckier, in a way, among the forest department beneficiaries who created the agarwood plantations. Many just got rid of the trees and planted something else in the allotted land, such as fruit orchards, lemon trees and timber species.
Some Forest Department officials think a lack of clear communication between the local perfume industry — the end user of the agar plantations — and the Forest Department led to this depressing situation.
“Without establishing a clear communication with the industry, industrial plantations cannot be successful. Now that the beneficiaries cannot reap the benefits of their work, they have lost interest in taking care of the gardens,” said Rakibul Hasan Mukul, deputy chief conservator of forests at the planning wing of the Forest Department.
He said comprehensive planning is key to successful industrial plantation, where the industry needs to play a proactive role.
“The industry needs to communicate their demand for raw material, their production capacity, and actual export volume,” Mukul said. “The agar industry could have been much bigger in this way.”
Private planters also clueless
Entrepreneurs growing agarwood on private lands are also facing difficulty finding buyers.
Subeer Qonok, an entrepreneur from Madhupur upazila, Tangail district, planted 150 agarwood plants in a 20-decimal (810-square-meter, or 8,712-square-foot) land in 2008. Many others like him did the same in the adjacent districts of Sherpur, Jamalpur and Mymensingh.
Agarwood trees can be inoculated at the age of 6 to 8 years and by the age of 8 to 12 years they can be used to produce perfume.
But 18 years after planting, Qonok’s agar trees remain unsold, just like Musa’s.
Musa said a potential buyer from the northeastern Moulvibazar district had visited and said they would pay 20,000 takas (approx. $160) for each of the trees. But Musa was not encouraged by the offer.
“Agar is gold. This is not cheap,” he said. He said he expects a far better price. There has been hype about the high-value tree, but planters are yet to see the offers to match their expectations.
For private growers like Qonok, the situation is trickier. He visited the factories in Moulvibazar, but could not find a buyer.
Most agar factories are concentrated in Moulvibazar. Recently, a Moulvibazar-based entrepreneur started another factory in Rangamati Hill district’s Marisha valley, and there is another factory in Mymensingh, but the expansion is much slower than the demand.
“No one has shown interest in buying agar from my area,” Qonok said. “At least 30% of the agar trees are now gone, either destroyed or cut down and sold as firewood. They are not even suitable for firewood.”
“If we had planted acacia or mahogany, they wouldn’t need further investment after planting. But the case of agar is different,” Qonok said.
Depending on the size, an agar tree needs 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of nails to be driven into it for its treatment, Qonok said. Coupled with labor wage, the cost would easily surpass 1,000 taka (more than $8) per tree, which many find discouraging with buyers nowhere in sight.
But the planters are not ready to sell the valuable trees for cheap either.
“One kg [2.2 lbs] of processed dark agarwood is sold for 100,000 takas [$816] in the country. I heard one trader came to Madhupur from Sylhet in an SUV — he bought a naturally inoculated tree for 300,000 takas [$2,450], made small blocks out of the tree and took it away in that very car,” Qonok said, clarifying that it was a one-off event.
“Even if anyone offered 10,000 takas [around $80] for a tree, the planters would have sold the trees. But there is no buyer,” he added.
The price of agarwood varies significantly based on the condition. While the dark wood is used for making expensive perfume and medicine, oil can be extracted from untreated wood as well, which is used for making attar (a natural perfume), which is both sold in the domestic market and exported to the Middle Eastern countries.
Major export destinations with significant markets include Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen.
There are also markets in the East Asian countries of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Some exports also reach Europe.
Unmet export potential
According to the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) database, in the 2023-24 fiscal year, agarwood and attar worth about $12.99 million was exported from Bangladesh, seeing about a 88% rise from $6.9 million in the previous year.
In the last fiscal year, however, exports saw a decline. In 2024-25, the products fetched around $8.2 million, 37% down year-on-year.
Industry insiders said the exports dropped due to political changes in the country and that it would normalize with time.
There are about 300 agar factories in the country, mostly concentrated in Sujanagar village in Barlekha upazila, Moulvibazar district. The factories mainly collect their raw material from the Sylhet region.
Asked why the factory owners do not offer a high price for agarwood planters in Madhupur or in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Kabir Ahmed Chowdhury, general secretary of Bangladesh Agar and Attar Manufacturers and Exporters Association, told Mongabay, “Collecting the woods and transporting them to Moulvibazar factories is costly, and then there are the processing costs, so the prices of [raw] agarwood cannot be very high.”
The perfume manufacturer noted that many agar planters in Madhupur area also grow pineapples beneath the trees, necessitating insecticide usage in large quantities. This drives away the insects necessary for natural inoculation of agar, driving down the price of the product, he said.
As the Forest Department has taken the initiative to float tenders for its agarwood plantations, agar traders, planters and officials say uncertainty still surrounds the selling of the trees as the perfume industry is not big enough to buy and process all the trees grown across the country.
“It is yet to be seen how the auction goes. Agar traders have to have interest in buying the trees, which depends on their demand for raw material,” said Mahmudul Hasan, the assistant chief conservator of forests.
Amid the uncertainty, the rationale for establishing agar plantations on forest lands, which harm biodiversity by shrinking wildlife habitat, faces a huge question mark as human-wildlife conflict increases across the country.
Banner image: A healthy private agarwood plantation in Sujanagar, Moulvibazar. Plantations in forest lands are often not as healthy as planters have lost interest due to delays in auctioning the trees. Image by Hasan Jamilur Rahman Saikat.
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