Dhofar Chronicle

Business · Agriculture · Exports

Frankincense season opens in Dhofar with exporters planning around the harvest

The al-Luban harvest still runs on the trees' schedule, not the market's. Traders who built their trade on it plan the year around a crop nobody can put on a calendar with certainty.

Dhofar's frankincense season has opened, and with it the trading year for the merchants, distillers and exporters who work around the harvest. Tapping of the boswellia trees traditionally begins in the spring, and the grade that comes off the bark in the first weeks commands the best prices.

The trade has been Dhofar's longest-running export — centuries older than any port in the governorate — and it still behaves the same way it always has. Yield depends on the trees, the rain and the tappers, and no exporter can commit to a volume before the season is in. Buyers of hojari grade report paying a premium for early, pale resin, and the distilleries that turn lower grades into oil run their capacity to whatever the season delivers.

What has changed is the paperwork: grading, export documentation and heritage branding have professionalised in recent years, and government promotion of Dhofar's heritage products has put frankincense at the front of the governorate's export story. The harvest itself has not.