CITES has listed all Aquilaria and Gyrinops species on Appendix II, meaning that exporting and re- exporting countries must have a CITES export permit, issued by the country CITES Management Authority, to sell any agarwood parts (except parts as covered under Annotation 14—see above) to an importing country. Importing countries are not required to provide an import certificate. They are, however, supposed to ensure that the paperwork is in order and matches the products in question, and some countries have supplied CITES voluntarily with information on agarwood imports.
Illegal harvesting represents the main threat to the remaining wild stocks of agarwood-producing species (UNODC 2016). Agarwood products comprised 6% of global seizures by value between 2005 and 2014, 4% of seizures between 2009 and 2013,
but dropped to 0.6% between 2014 and 2018 (UNODC 2020). Their reports also noted that it
is likely that only a very small proportion of illegal product is seized in any given year. Interestingly, agarwood is mentioned 71 times in the 2016 UNODC report, but only five times in the 2020 report, suggesting that perhaps there has either been reduced enforcement effort, or that the amount
of illegal product has declined. Unfortunately,
the UNODC reports did not indicate amount or types of materials seized and so there is no way of determining if a possible decline in illegal agarwood, as suggested, was an actual decline in product seized, a relative increase in other products seized, reduced enforcement efforts, or an increase in the value of some of the other products reported. The UNODC data indicated that most seizures occurred from 2007 to 2011, and there was very minimal information on agarwood seized products in the 2020 UNODC report. CITES receives illegal seizure reports annually from most countries, but those data are confidential, and so it was not possible to corroborate the UNODC information.
UNODC indicated that illegal agarwood products are largely laundered through plantation operations, with no way to follow chain of custody, and Lim et al.
