The harvester's labor is the origin of the whole chain — and they're last to benefit.
In the Somali region of eastern Ethiopia, in a place called Afcadde, there are trees that have been bleeding quietly for centuries. The resin they produce — myrrh — has traveled from this cracked, sun-hammered landscape to the altars of ancient Egypt, to the wrists of people who spend $500 on a bottle of Tom Ford perfume, to the medicine cabinets of people newly curious about natural remedies. The trees are still here. But they are struggling, and so are the people who depend on them.
The drought that has settled over this part of the Horn of Africa is not an ordinary one. Rains have been failing for several years running, broken only by a destructive flood in 2023 that offered no real relief. Experts point to the changing climate as the cause. The land shows it: cracked earth, dwindling water sources, livestock that are thin and desperate. Herders travel as far as 200 kilometers to reach Sanqotor village, where a single well still holds water. When they arrive, the local headman Ali Mohamed watches hundreds of animals crowd around it. Guests water their animals first, he said. Then the villagers drink.
The myrrh trees themselves tell a complicated story. The adult trees are, for now, mostly alive — but they are producing less resin than before. The more urgent problem is the generation below them. Seedlings are not surviving. Some are pulled from the ground by children tending starving livestock nearby; the animals eat the young buds before the trees have a chance. Without rain, others simply fail. Anjanette DeCarlo, a sustainable supply chain researcher at the University of Vermont who led a recent research expedition to the region, worries that if conditions do not change, even the mature trees will eventually die.
Earlier this year, DeCarlo and Stephen Johnson, a resin expert who runs FairSource Botanicals, traveled to Afcadde alongside researchers from the Somali Regional Pastoral and Agro-Pastoral Research Institute. They were supported by the American Herbal Products Association and a nonprofit called Born Global. Their purpose was not simply to document the crisis but to understand the supply chain — and to ask whether the people doing the hardest work were seeing any of the money.
The answer, plainly, is no. A harvester collecting a kilogram of myrrh resin — roughly two pounds — earns somewhere between $3.50 and $10. The perfumes that resin eventually helps create, sold under names like Comme des Garcons and Jo Malone, can retail for up to $500 a bottle. The gap between those two numbers is not just economic inequality; it is the distance between survival and destitution for communities that have no other income source. Ethiopia collects no taxes on myrrh exports, and most of the resin is purchased by traders from neighboring Somalia before it disappears into an opaque global supply chain.
What the researchers found in the harvesting practices themselves was something worth preserving. Local communities collect resin from wounds that occur naturally in the trees, rather than cutting into the bark deliberately — a method that weakens trees and invites pests and disease. This traditional approach has remained unchanged for generations, and DeCarlo was direct about its value: it is in balance with the trees, she said, and it should be celebrated, not replaced.
Mohamed Osman Miyir, a local elder, was less celebratory about what he sees happening around him. Young trees are disappearing, he said. The population of myrrh trees is declining. He is deeply worried. For the poorest residents of the region — those who own no livestock and have no other resource — the resin is not a commodity. It is the only thing standing between them and nothing.
The researchers left with a clear goal: help these communities access direct markets, cutting out the middlemen who absorb most of the profit. Abdinasir Abdikadir Aweys, a senior researcher on the team, said the harvesters themselves expressed hope that a more direct path to buyers would mean better prices and something closer to a stable livelihood. Whether that hope translates into action — and whether it comes in time — is the question the trees, and the people around them, are waiting on.
Notable Quotes
Traditional practice is in balance and protects trees. It should be celebrated.— Anjanette DeCarlo, University of Vermont researcher and expedition leader
We are deeply worried about the declining population of myrrh trees.— Mohamed Osman Miyir, local elder in Afcadde, Ethiopia
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
What's the thing about this story that doesn't fit neatly into a climate story or a trade story?
It's both, and neither fully. The drought is real and worsening, but the poverty was already there before the rains stopped failing. The climate crisis is accelerating something that was already broken.
The price gap — $3.50 a kilogram versus $500 a bottle — is almost too stark to be useful. Does it actually tell us anything?
It tells you where the value is being captured and where it isn't. The harvester's labor is the origin of the whole chain, and they're the last to benefit from it. That's not a natural law. It's a choice embedded in how the supply chain was built.
The traditional harvesting method — collecting from natural wounds rather than cutting — seems almost incidental in the story. Is it?
Not at all. It's the quiet center of it. The communities have been doing something right for generations, something that protects the trees, and no one in the global market has been paying them for that stewardship. They've been subsidizing the luxury industry with their restraint.
What does it mean that Ethiopia collects no taxes on myrrh exports?
It means the country itself isn't capturing value either. The resin leaves, the money follows it out, and the communities are left with the environmental cost and very little else.
The well scene — hundreds of animals crowding around it, guests watering their livestock before the villagers drink — what does that say?
It says the social order has reorganized itself around scarcity. Hospitality still holds, but it's hospitality under enormous strain. That detail carries more weight than any statistic about rainfall.
Is there a version of this story where the direct market access actually works?
Possibly. But it requires buyers in the luxury industry to care enough to pay more and trace where their ingredients come from. Some do. Most don't. The researchers are betting on the ones who might.