Nagaland is home to more than 2.28 million cultivated agarwood trees, a plantation base large enough to anchor a structured, high-value industry. As discussions around a proposed state agarwood policy gather pace, the question is no longer about cultivation, but about scale: can processing and market infrastructure keep up?
Scientific data from the Non-Detriment Findings (NDF) assessment on agarwood (Aquilaria malaccensis), prepared by the Botanical Survey of India under CITES compliance requirements, place Nagaland’s cultivated stock at 2.28 million trees, as of 2022. The figure forms part of India’s total 139.89 million artificially propagated agarwood plants.
The district-wise distribution is sharply concentrated. Mokokchung alone accounts for approximately 1.2 million trees, more than half of the state’s total. Dimapur follows with around 0.3 million plants, with additional plantations recorded in Longleng, Mon, Peren and Wokha.
In the global market, the real commercial value of agarwood lies not in raw wood chips but in agar oil extracted through hydro-distillation of resin-impregnated heartwood.
For the 2024–27 period, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade has allocated Nagaland an annual export quota of 3,400 kilograms of agarwood chips and powder and 180 kilograms of agar oil derived from cultivated sources, subject to documentation and traceability norms. However, there are no available official figures indicating the scale of actual exports originating from the state in recent years.
At the same time, much of the Northeast’s established distillation capacity has historically been concentrated in neighbouring Assam, which has a longer commercial footprint in agar processing.
Processing initiatives are not entirely absent within Nagaland. An agar and essential oil distillation factory was inaugurated in 2012 at Merangmen village in Mokokchung district as a joint venture between the Nagaland Bio Resource Mission and Lao Agar International Development Co. Ltd.
Private enterprises based in Dimapur are also engaged in manufacturing and marketing agarwood products, including chips and oil.
Yet with more than two million recorded trees and a dominant cultivation base in Mokokchung, the broader policy conversation now turns to adequacy and scale.
Nagaland has already built the plantation foundation. Whether it can develop the industrial ecosystem, from distillation capacity to export linkages, will determine if the state remains primarily a supplier of raw material or emerges as a value-driven participant in one of the world’s most lucrative forest product markets.