Frankincense has moved from temple censer to serum bottle, and the shift is straining the Horn of Africa’s oldest export. In Somalia, the resin remains the country’s third-largest source of income after livestock and agriculture, largely harvested from mountainous Somaliland and Puntland. However, the absence of regulatory oversight, exploitation by middlemen and international companies, and the impacts of climate change all present sizable threats to the Boswellia species, especially because newly planted trees can take up to 25 years to mature and yield resins.
Across the border, Ethiopia’s Boswellia papyrifera trees, which supply much of the world’s raw frankincense resin, are declining dramatically and could decrease by 90% over the next 50 years. Meanwhile, demand keeps climbing without pause. In 2026, the global incense market alone is valued at $6.2 billion and is projected to reach $26.27 billion by 2034. Every serum with “frankincense” on the ingredient deck is drawing, however faintly, from the same shrinking pool of trees clinging to cliffsides in the Horn of Africa. That mismatch of soaring appetite and collapsing supply is the real story behind the threat of frankincense production in Africa.
The scarcity is already showing up in the ledgers. Tigray, one of Ethiopia’s largest frankincense-producing regions, exported 9,604 tons between 2008/09 and 2012/13, earning a total of $32.74 million, with China, Germany, Greece, Tunisia, the UAE and Vietnam importing 81% of the total. Fast-forward, and the volumes tell a starker story. Officials projected 745 tons of incense would leave Ethiopia in a recent shipping year, but less than 500 tons was exported over nine months, generating $2.2 million, figures five times lower than export revenues from seven years earlier, when Ethiopia exported 3,500 tonnes and earned 11.8 million dollars.
Speaking to BeautyMatter, Ali Abdi of Desert Resin was transparent about what sustainable tapping actually requires. “Responsible harvesting has very clear limits, and this is something many people outside the industry misunderstand. A healthy frankincense tree should not be tapped continuously or excessively,” he said, adding that traditionally, harvesters understood that trees need rest periods. The math on rest periods is survival. “The problem today is that some trees are overtapped because of market demand and economic pressure. When trees are stressed repeatedly, resin quality declines and tree health suffers,” he added.
Gary Scallan, founder of Afrika Botanicals, who sources Somali frankincense through a single supplier he’s vetted personally, put the human stakes in plainer terms to BeautyMatter. “If you exploit the raw product, you’re going to get less for it, and the community still remains poor. So you need to protect the plants, the trees, [and] the community.” He also highlighted the paradox at the heart of the tree’s appeal: that the harshest habitats produce the finest resin.
Follow the money and the disconnect gets almost absurd. Scallan pointed to a mainstream frankincense essential oil retailing for $103.50 for 20 milliliters, sourced, he said, from the exact same Somali region as his own supply. He called the markup impossible to justify against what harvesters and distillers are actually paid. He’s skeptical of a $12, 30ml serum listing frankincense as a headline ingredient. “There’s no way that they’re using a real frankincense,” he said.
Scallan said he tested the alternative himself. For two weeks, he burned a sample from his Somali supplier as incense in his own home, tracking burn time and scent behavior like a chemist running a control. “I’ve smelt the real thing, I’ve tasted the real thing,” he said. “I don’t believe a lot of the frankincense people [are] buying as pure frankincense is sustainable.”
Abdi’s explanation for why the economics don’t stretch down to bargain pricing is precise. “Consumers often do not realize how much raw resin is required to produce authentic, steam-distilled frankincense oil,” he said. According to him, it is a process built on large quantities of high-quality resin, careful grading, labor-intensive harvesting, transport from remote mountain regions, sorting, cleaning, and proper distillation. When a price looks too good, he advised, buyers should be asking whether the oil is diluted, low-grade, mislabeled, or simply untraceable. “One major misconception is that frankincense is an unlimited resource because it has been traded for thousands of years. It is not unlimited.”
That undervaluation isn’t a victimless quirk of the market. It loops directly back into the overharvesting problem. Research on frankincense-dependent households in Ethiopia’s Borana zone found the resin contributes on average about 35% of total annual household cash income. Cheap resin at the farm gate isn’t only an unfair practice; it is the mechanism driving the very depletion everyone claims to be worried about.
The clearest structural countermove brewing is keeping processing inside the country of origin, breaking the old pattern of shipping raw resin out, refining it elsewhere, and selling the finished oil back at a premium. That’s the entire premise behind Sheba Nordic Oils. As CEO Meeraf Fulas told BeautyMatter, “The stories that we keep hearing are that people take raw material from Africa and then take it elsewhere—sometimes halfway across the world—process it, and send it back to Africa.” His answer is total vertical integration on Ethiopian soil. “[For us], everything is done in Ethiopia. Even the bottles are produced in Ethiopia,” he continued.
According to Fulas, this should be paired with an active effort to strip out layers of intermediaries. “We cut out a lot of middlemen so [farmers] can get a higher percentage of the profits.” Notably, he pushed back on the assumption that farmers are the reluctant party in ethical sourcing. “That’s usually not the issue. They [the farmers] just want to sell to the highest bidder.”
That traceability gap is exactly what HALO Trust’s field research flags at industry scale: Low prices paid to harvesting communities also often result in the over-tapping of trees, placing their long-term health and the community’s livelihoods at risk. Abdi emphasized this, but from a buyer’s perspective. “Many supply chains still involve multiple intermediaries, and resin from different regions or species can be mixed before export. Brands can verify sourcing, but only if they build direct relationships, request documentation, and work with suppliers committed to traceability.” In-country processing doesn’t solve everything, but it collapses the number of hands the resin passes through before it’s bottled.
With Boswellia yield already projected to halve within two decades in parts of the Horn of Africa, that reward structure has to show up where it matters—including at the price paid to the person climbing the tree, not just in a brand’s marketing copy. The frankincense on shelves right now is, quite literally, running on borrowed time from a tree that can’t be rushed, faked convincingly, or grown anywhere easier.