Somalia · Food / Tobacco / Drink Processing (resin harvesting)
Manqaf (the specialized tapping tool/chisel used to make incisions in the bark)
The hand-tapping and resin collection of frankincense from wild Boswellia trees -- principally Boswellia sacra, B. frereana, and B. carteri -- in the mountainous regions of Puntland, Somaliland, and the Somalia-Ethiopian border, a practice directly traced back nearly 5,000 years and passed down within harvesting families for generations. Using a manqaf, harvesters make shallow incisions -- generally 3 to 13 per tree -- into the bark of trees at least 10 centimeters in diameter; the wounded bark bleeds a milky sap that hardens over one to two days into amber-colored resin droplets, which harvesters chip away by hand into baskets once dry. In Somalia specifically, tapping occurs during two seasonal periods each lasting three to four months, with successive tappings on the same tree repeated at roughly 15-day intervals, each round producing resin of a documented, graded quality. A dedicated multi-year field research initiative (Species Saviour Initiative, May 2021-October 2023) has directly documented the harvesters' Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) -- unwritten rules, seasonal rhythms, and management practices passed down orally -- as currently unrecognized in formal conservation policy despite its direct role in sustaining both the resource and harvester livelihoods. Frankincense remains Somalia's third-largest source of export income after livestock and agriculture, and historically supported over 10,000 harvesting families; the Boswellia tree itself is now assessed as at risk of near-total loss within 50 years without intervention, driven by increased global demand pushing more frequent tapping than trees can sustainably bear.
Risk level: Endangered · Not independently inscribed
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