MEDIA RELEASE
Asian sandalwood buyers drawn to world leader Western Australia
15 March 2006
A group of up to 20 Asian sandalwood buyers arrive in Perth tomorrow for a landmark three-day symposium and field trip in Western Australia – now established as the world’s leading supplier of sandalwood.
Forestry Minister Kim Chance said the State currently supplied about 40 per cent of global sales of sandalwood, a fragrant timber that has long been used as incense in religious ceremonies in India and most other Asian countries.
Mr Chance said about 2,000 tonnes of native Western Australian sandalwood was harvested each year, with all of the material coming from natural stands, mainly in the pastoral regions of the State’s Goldfields.
“Markets worldwide are currently facing a serious shortage of increasingly expensive, high quality Indian sandalwood,” the Minister said.
“This is largely as a result of unsustainable harvesting of this species over a long period of time in India and other parts of Asia.
“Over the past ten years, Western Australian sandalwood has significantly increased its share of the global sandalwood market,” Mr Chance said.
The Minister added that in recent times, Western Australian sandalwood oil had been accepted as an important ingredient in the world’s fine fragrance and aroma therapy industries.
The total area where wild stands of Western Australian sandalwood grow naturally in Western Australia covers about 160 million hectares, of which about half is available for harvesting.
“The sandalwood industry is managed by the State Government’s Forest Products Commission (FPC), which ensures its long-term viability and guarantees that principles of ecologically sustainable forest management are applied,” Mr Chance said.
The Minister said that the regeneration of native sandalwood stands had slowed in recent decades, with feral cats and foxes decimating the numbers of small marsupials, such as the woylie, which feed on sandalwood nuts.
“The woylies would scatter-hoard the nuts like squirrels, burying them and then forgetting about them, so that the seeds germinated and the trees regenerated naturally.
“With these marsupials now in danger of extinction, FPC researchers have taken to mimicking the actions of the woylie, with harvesting contractors being asked to plant a minimum of 12 fresh seeds for each sandalwood tree they harvest,” Mr Chance said.
The Minister added that FPC had also adopted a successful technique for preventing feral goats from feeding on sandalwood trees on pastoral leases, by supplying pastoralists with Total Grazing Management kits to trap the animals.
“Once the goats are trapped, they are loaded onto trucks and exported,” Mr Chance said.
“The FPC and its predecessors have also undertaken intensive research over the past 20 years to establish plantations of Western Australian and Indian sandalwood,” he said.
The Minister said the FPC believed that both sandalwood species had the potential to become an important plantation tree crop in medium and low rainfall regions in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt, Midwest and Rangelands.
Mr Chance said the FPC shared much of its research into plantation establishment with commercial organisations and farmers within the State, to encourage plantation establishment.
The Minister said harvesting and regeneration rotations from wild stands would continue to meet current market demand into the foreseeable future.
“The export trade in sandalwood is nothing new to Western Australia,” Mr Chance said. “Sandalwood is the State’s oldest export commodity, with the first shipments to China in 1844, and the trade building to its peak in 1920, when over 14,000 tonnes was exported at a value of ₤240,500.”
Downloads
- Asian sandalwood buyers drawn to world leader Western Australia - 81kB PDF (15/03/2006)
