n Tseykeme, a village of stone farmsteads in northern Ethiopia 3,400 miles from the expensive shops of Covent Garden, a small copse of frankincense trees clings to a rocky hillside. Their twisting branches are gnarled, and the flaky, paper-like bark resembles that of a birch. The trees’ trunks bear scars: raw red patches where the bark has been crudely hacked away.
Frankincense thieves come here almost every night, says Demstu Gebremichael, a local farmer. Usually, they work by moonlight, but Demstu can sometimes see the flash of torches as they scrape away the valuable white sap oozing from cuts in his trees.
For decades, 78-year-old Demstu harvested the frankincense himself, loaded it on to camels, and sold it in the nearest town, Abi Adi. The small sums of money it generated supplemented his income as a subsistence farmer. “This is how we bought things like clothes and school materials for the children,” says Demstu.
These days, however, he harvests “almost nothing”. The resin is stolen before he can collect it. Standing beneath one of his 36 frankincense trees, Demstu tells of beatings meted out to neighbours who confronted the thieves, mostly local young men who have lost their livelihoods to war and drought.
“People need to survive somehow,” says Demstu, “so they turn to this.”
As more people extract the resin from a shrinking number of trees, the future of the species – and of local farmers – is under threat. One of the first warnings that frankincense was teetering towards extinction came in 2011: a study of Boswellia papyrifera in northern Ethiopia predicted that 90% of the trees could disappear by 2060.
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