SYDNEY,AUSTRALIA September 17, 2015 (by Geoff Hiscock, Tropical Forest Service): From luxury French perfumes such as Chanel No. 5 and Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium to the humble incense stick, from traditional Chinese medicine to modern pharmaceuticals, and from Hindu and Buddhist religious carvings to fine furniture, there is a common ingredient – sandalwood. For thousands of years, richly scented sandalwood has been traded across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, Egypt, Greece and Rome.Today, the sandalwood trade spans the world, but a guaranteed supply is a big issue.
The best variety of sandalwood is judged to be Indian (Santalum album), which grows mainly in the southern Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It can also be found in parts of Indonesia. But illegal harvesting of wild trees, coupled with surging global demand, has endangered Indian sandalwood to the point where it is now in short supply and is the world’s most expensive tropical hardwood. TFS, an Australian company, wants to change that situation. TFS says it is already the world’s “leading grower, producer and seller of Indian sandalwood,” with annual production capacity in Australia of 2,000 metric tons. Over the next decade, it aims to supply key markets in the Middle East and Asia with as much as 300 tons annually of the valuable heartwood and associated oil. The company cultivates millions of trees on plantations across northern Australia. There, a sandalwood tree takes about 15 years to reach maturity and produces about 20kg of heartwood. Much older trees in India can produce 80 kg of heartwood after 50 years of growing.
The native Australian sandalwood has a lower oil content than the heavy Indian type and, today, commands only about a tenth of the price. Global demand has shifted toward Indian sandalwood; more than half of all output of the yellow-hued timber is used in worship ceremonies. TFS started planting Indian sandalwood trees 15 years ago in Western Australia and now manages more than 10,500 hectares of plantations spread across the East Kimberley region of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, plus the Burdekin region of north Queensland. That equates to about 4.6 million trees. About a third of these trees are owned or part-owned by TFS, with the remainder belonging to a range of investors, including Harvard University, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and the Church Commissioners of England.