The World Cup stopped the planet, but could not broadcast what Qatar smells like. Although they must have guessed it by now. Qatar smells of money, like the rest of the opulent monarchies of Arabia. Like these, it monopolizes the most valuable of incense and essential oils, which they call oud.
It is nothing more than aloe stick (not to be confused with aloe vera), a tree native to northeast India and southeast Asia, whose wood is potentially the most expensive in the world, based on its age and resin concentration. In the form of perfume, it has taken half the world’s duty free and high-end perfumeries by storm. But there is a catch. Even luxury brands almost always give a pig for a poke. As much as it reads oud on their labels, their bottles usually do not contain a single drop of this caviar of essential oils. Although there are some exceptions –the most conspicuous, The Night, at a thousand euros per bottle–, the vast majority are content with laboratory molecules, without realizing that it is a substitute.
This bizarre situation, not to say fraudulent, derives to a large extent from the well-intentioned Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). In his case, it was about protecting the centuries-old specimens of aloe trees, hidden in increasingly remote jungles of Southeast Asia. However, practically all of them were felled more than thirty years ago. A surviving specimen, in a temple in Thailand, whose bud would be worth its weight in gold, requires 24-hour police protection.
However, there had never been so many millions of aloe specimens, because as its extinction in the jungle became inexorable, plantations large and small sprang up, from the hills of Assam to Indonesia, passing through Laos. Despite this, the producers of the 99.99% of the oud that actually exist suffer from the bureaucracy created to protect something that practically no longer exists.
In small or medium-sized countries, the obligatory obtaining of plantation, felling and export certificates can work, but in others, such as India, it is something only within the reach of a handful of oligarchs – one could say that the true protected species – to whom hundreds of thousands of peasants are forced to sell off their trees.
Among these potentates, the Ajmal family stands out. A Catalan perfumer remembers his patriarch, when he planted his first stall in Dubai, in the seventies. Ajmal now has dozens of stores in all the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. A true vertical integration, from the plantation to the distillation and marketing of its own perfumes. Two of his sons continued in the Emirates and the other two in India, where one of them, Badruddin Ajmal, founded his own political party in Assam to protect the business while claiming to look after Bengali-speaking Muslims.
In an alleyway in Doha’s reconstructed Wakif souq, all the shops are run by Bangladeshis and all feature oud as their flagship product. Either in the form of essential oil or chips to burn in braziers. “The Ajmal also come from Bangladesh,” a merchant assured La Vanguardia. “From my own village, near Sylhet. I could tell you which house.”
The scent of aloe, once distilled, is overwhelmingly masculine and could be compared to that of a stallion barn. Quite a mystery, when it is nothing more than a resin that the tree secretes to defend itself from natural aggression. In any case, what seduces the nose of the Arabs is something still thick, but much more diluted and refined. As a sahumerio, they use it to perfume their houses and their clothes. That’s what the lobbies of the big hotels in Doha or its shopping centers smell like, as well as the alley of perfumes.
At the other end of Asia, in Japan, aloe is also the king of incense, while the Chinese prefer it for carving sculptures and the Buddhists for rosaries.
It should be said that, while in the northeast of India in a reasonable number of trees the resin arises naturally, due to the presence of the insect, in Southeast Asia this is exceptional, so artificial inoculation is the rule, to the detriment of the quality.
Despite this advantage, India is only now beginning to awaken from its slumber. The Upper House has approved the creation of an Oud Board, like those that exist for tea or spices, to expedite exports, “as Laos or Thailand do.” So much so, that until now shipments from the aforementioned countries were purchased, just to appropriate their export certificate. In practice, the Indian speaker recognized that “our peasants have no choice but to undersell on the black market.”
In other words, although everyone knows that more than 99.99% of aloe vera comes from plantations, the bureaucratic obstacles to certify it keep hundreds of thousands or millions of Asian families in poverty. While they tie dozens of sophisticated fragrance brands to lies. For these, money –as the classics said– “doesn’t smell”.