Aloes wood, including tram huong and ky nam, are all national forbidden goods. However, they have been exploited uncontrollably and exported illegally.
Aloes wood, including tram huong and ky nam, are all national forbidden goods
Tram huong and ky nam are the two types of aloes wood, and both are very expensive. A kilo of tram huong would be sold at hundreds of millions of dong, while a kilo of ky nam would be priced at nearly VND10 billion (USD483,792). The high values of the aloes wood have encouraged people to deforest in looking for aloes wood to sale.
According to Director of the Quang Nam provincial Department for Agriculture and Rural Development, Nguyen Thanh Quang, since tram huong and ky nam are national forbidden goods, they must not be exploited and traded under any form.
However, over the last 20 years, no case of arresting illegal loggers or seizing illegally exploited tram huong and ky nam has been found, even though people keep whispering in each others’ ears that local residents in mountainous districts of Quang Nam province can earn fat money from aloes wood exports. The legal regulation on prohibiting to exploit and export aloes wood is still valid, but there has been no new legal document that guides the management and protection of the natural resource which is in the danger of getting exhausted.
Every year, thousands of young people leave mountainous districts of Dai Loc, Nong Son and Hiep Duc for the mountains to look for aloes wood, while their leave remains out of the control of the local authorities.
An official of the Dai Loc district’s people’s committee said that young people leave for the mountains in small groups like mason coolie.
It is quite a normal thing in rural areas that people leave the areas after finishing crops to seek other jobs. Therefore, the local authorities do not have the right to forbid them to leave the home villages to take other non-agricultural jobs.
Meanwhile, as the forests are vast, the number of forest rangers is limited. No one could control the thousands of people who spread out in the forests seeking aloes wood.
Tram huong and ky nam are confirmed to be valuable resources of the country, but it is a particular type of product, unlike the other minerals, such as gold. They lie on both the trunk of do tree (paper mulberry) and underground. They could not be discovered or explored by any machine or device. Therefore, it is impossible to define the aloe wood areas for protection.
For the last many years, people have been relying on their experiences when looking for aloes wood and exploiting the wood, while all the works have been done manually.
Local residents say that natural do trees which have the size equivalent to people’s wrist of larger have all disappeared in Vietnam. Therefore, they have to return to the old forests which they once came to before, where they try to dig the trees they chopped down in the past. They look for the forests by they memory and experiences. Sometimes, they excavate everywhere in the forests where they think do trees are existing.
No one can say for sure if there are still tram huong and ky nam in Vietnamese forests, how much in reserves and how to protect them.
Regeneration really a difficult task
Do tree is not considered a previous tree which needs protection. However, tram huong and ky nam can only be generated on the tree trunk. Natural tram huong can be formed from wounds on trees (broken twigs, branches collision, windstorm, shrapnel shells, carved perforated by insects ...).
People classify tram huong based on the oil density. And tram huong will become ky nam only when the oil density is really concentrated and there are no impurities. Ky nam can be found only on the dead do trees.
Previously, people believed that the natural resources could not be renewable. However, they have changed their mind. In the last tens of years, local residents in the mountainous areas of Quang Nam, Phu Yen and Binh Dinh have been rushing to grow do trees and create tram huong. When the trees grow enough, people create wounds on the trees and inject chemical substances to create tram huong. The artificial tram huong also has fragrance like natural aloes wood, but it remains unclear about its values.
