Sadaharitha to popularise agarwood

Sadaharitha Plantations Ltd, a commercial forestry management company, has set up a state-of-the-art nursery to cultivate Aquilaria trees, which are used to produce agarwood, as an initial step to popularise it as a garden plant.

The nursery in Ingiriya, spanning five acres, houses 250,000 agarwood plants. The nursery operations include importing high quality agarwood seeds from Asia Pacific countries, cultivating them and nurturing them up to the point of handing over to the customer.

The nursery is one of the largest nurseries in Asia and has a buffer stock of 500,000 plants at any given time.

The agarwood plants are produced in Vietnam and the seeds are imported to Sri Lanka after being certified and approved by the State Agriculture Department of Vietnam. The staff in the nursery are trained to manage these plants from its infancy stage upto the stage it can be handed over to the customer for cultivation.

Apart from its own staff, the company from time to time employs foreign and local experts in commercial plantation management to advise their staff.

The patent to produce agarwood has been obtained by the University of Minnesota, and Sadaharitha Plantations receives the fullest cooperation and technical guidance from the University.

The company has obtained all the approvals from the National Plant Quarantine Service under the Agriculture Ministry and the Central Environmental Authority in all its commercial forestry management projects.

The owner can sell the plant when it reaches the point of producing agarwood either to the company or to any other interested party. The company pays a guaranteed price of Rs. 25,000 and a projected price up to Rs. 50,000.

Sadaharitha Plantations plans to extract oil from agarwood and plans to set up an oil extraction factory with a world giant in a similar industry.

The most productive districts for agarwood cultivation are Kalutara, Colombo, Gampaha, Galle, Matara, Ratnapura, Kandy and Kegalle.

The nursery has been approved by the Wildlife and Environment Conservation Ministry and Central Environment Authority.