But a team led by CFANS plant pathologist Bob Blanchette worked with Vietnamese farmers to develop a cultivated version of the trees that provides a sustainable crop for some of the world’s poorest regions while saving an endangered species.
The project is one example of how scientists are learning to work in cooperation with people from different cultures. Traditionally, scientists have worked alone to produce innovations or ideas and transferred their work to communities with the expectation that community members would put the ideas to work as directed by the scientists.
But modern science recognizes that a bidirectional, cooperative process can benefit both the scientists’ work as well as the end result for users. That may become an increasingly important factor in a changing global climate.
Blanchette’s project, begun about 12 years ago through the Rainforest Project Foundation, started with a meeting of scientists and village leaders. “They were excited about the possibilities,” he says, because the incense has such important religious significance and because the trees were disappearing so fast.
Eventually, the scientists discovered that Aquilaria trees produced agarwood as a response to micro-organisms that invaded when the trees were wounded. “Usually you want to limit decay, but in this case, we wanted to stimulate it,” Blanchette says. Research into how the agarwood could be harvested from younger trees continued, and now cultivated fast-growing Aquilaria trees are being planted in large numbers and can be harvested after just two years for a sustainable production of the valuable resin.
Local farmers played an important role in the development of the new crop: their traditional knowledge of how the trees grow and the importance of agarwood helped the Western scientists understand the process. As the project began to see success, more local farmers asked to participate in demonstration plot plantings.
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