Dipterocarpus Resin in Ratanakiri: The Sap That Sustains the Villages

In the forests of Ratanakiri, an age-old gesture repeats itself, generation after generation: notching the trunk of a canopy giant to collect its fragrant sap. Caught between village subsistence, customary knowledge and mounting pressure from land concessions, the resin of Dipterocarpus — long known locally by its older spelling, Dichterocarpus — tells the story of an increasingly fragile balance between the mountain peoples and the forest that feeds them.

A tapper lights a small fire of twigs to revive the flow of resin — © CG

A totem tree at the heart of daily life

Across the provinces of northeastern Cambodia, Ratanakiri foremost among them, the Dipterocarpus — several species of which grow here, notably Dipterocarpus alatus — is no ordinary tree. Often standing over thirty metres tall, with a straight trunk and a broad, spreading crown, it is one of 189 tree species recorded in the province's forests.

The crown of a Dipterocarpus, totem tree of the Ratanakiri forest — © CG

For the ethnic minorities who inhabit these highlands — Brao, Tampuon, Kreung, Jarai, Kavet and Kachak among others — this tree is at once a major economic resource and a landmark in the village landscape, passed down like a piece of family property.

The tapper's craft: a method that has stayed artisanal

The harvest, known in Cambodia as tapage, follows a technique that has changed remarkably little. The resin tapper cuts into the trunk with a hatchet, hollowing out a cavity a few dozen centimetres above the ground — sometimes higher on trees that have already been worked for years.

Perched on a bamboo scaffold, the tapper watches the fire and the collecting basket lashed to the trunk — © CG

The sap — a fragrant, viscous oleoresin — then seeps slowly into this natural cavity. To speed up and prolong the flow, the tapper lights a small fire of twigs or dead leaves at the bottom of the cut: the heat burns off the hardened resin on the surface and sets the seep flowing again.

Once the fire has died down, the tapper lets the liquefied resin run before collecting it — © CG

The liquid is then gathered with a ladle or a length of bamboo, before being poured into cans or jerrycans for the journey back to the village.

A close-up of raw resin being harvested, still warm at the bottom of the cut — © CG

A single tree can be tapped for decades, with the tapper returning to collect fresh resin every one to two weeks. It is patient work, often carried out as a family, requiring an intimate knowledge of each tree's own rhythm of production: over-tapping a cut exhausts it, whereas a measured approach lets the same trunk produce for an entire human lifetime, or longer.

A customary form of ownership, passed down through the generations

Unlike most forest resources, which indigenous communities generally treat as a commons open to all, the resin tree is subject to individual or family ownership recognised by custom. Whoever first notches a Dipterocarpus becomes, by tradition, its de facto owner: he marks the tree, passes its use on to his children, and no one else will tap it without his consent.

A Kavet family in front of their stilt house: like the household itself, ownership of the resin trees is handed down from one generation to the next — © CG

Studies carried out in Kon Mum district, Ratanakiri, show that this customary ownership can also be shared: some trees are worked by small informal groups of tappers, others managed communally, with the whole village dividing up the harvest.

Interestingly, researchers have found that trees managed collectively or by small groups tend to be in better condition than those worked by a single owner — multiple users exercising a form of mutual oversight that limits over-tapping and vandalism. This customary recognition of ownership over resin trees has in fact been partly written into Cambodian law: Article 29 of the 2002 Forestry Law specifically protects trees tapped for resin from felling, precisely in order to safeguard this traditional livelihood of indigenous communities.

The village economy: a supplementary income that has become vital

In a subsistence economy built around rain-fed rice and shifting cultivation, resin occupies a place apart: it is one of the few sources of regular cash income for households, sold to local collectors who then channel it toward urban markets, chief among them Banlung, the provincial capital. Some of it is also kept for strictly domestic and craft uses: waterproofing boats and woven baskets, making torches from resin mixed with rags for night-time lighting, and traditional varnish.

Traditional caulking of a dugout canoe with resin: one of its most widespread domestic uses — © CG

Studies conducted in other forested provinces of the country, such as Stung Treng, estimate that a household living near the forest can earn several dozen US dollars a month from resin — a decisive contribution during the lean season, when rice stocks run low before the new harvest.

Beyond its local uses, Dipterocarpus resin also draws interest from far more distant industries: paints, inks, varnishes, and even cosmetics and perfumery. It was precisely this that brought the Frenchman Olivier Berah — a figure from the NGO Man and Nature, nicknamed the local "Crocodile Dundee" — to Ratanakiri in 2013 to meet resin producers, on a mission for a major cosmetics brand in search of new natural ingredients. Working with the Cambodian NGO Poh Kao, he collected samples destined for a French laboratory, opening up a possible avenue that, if developed sustainably, could give tapper villages an additional outlet for a resource that had until then been sold mostly on regional markets.

A resource under siege from the advancing frontier

This system, stable for generations, is now under serious strain. Since the 2000s, the Cambodian state has granted a growing number of economic land concessions (ELCs) to private companies for rubber, oil palm, coffee and cashew plantations. Handed out without genuine prior consultation of communities, and often at odds with customary land systems, these concessions have led to the clearing of vast stretches of forest — including plots where resin trees, worked for decades, once stood.

As early as 2004, a Finnish researcher studying the economic transformation of Ratanakiri concluded that the region had already reached a turning point in its history, where decisions made far from the villages were bearing down, often irreversibly, on local livelihoods.

A second, more direct threat has been added to this: illegal logging. A mature Dipterocarpus is also valuable timber for sawmills and clandestine export networks, particularly toward Vietnam. Felling a resin tree brings to an abrupt end an income that a tapping family may have drawn from it for generations — even where the law, in theory, protects marked trees. A 2022 report by Amnesty International on illegal logging in the country's north found that this plunder threatened not only biodiversity, but also struck directly at the culture and livelihoods of indigenous communities — the Kuy in particular, whose cultural survival is being undermined by the steady retreat of forest cover.

In the face of land conversion, some Bunong communities in neighbouring Mondulkiri have organised resistance through ritual ceremonies, the ordination of trees in saffron cloth — a Buddhist practice placing a trunk symbolically under the sangha's protection — as well as protests, road blockades, and legal action. The results, according to local associations, have most often remained limited against the weight of the economic interests involved.

Between ecotourism, community forests and uncertainty

The Ratanakiri of 2026 is no longer quite the one filmed in 2013 for the documentary "Peuples des Montagnes": roads have been paved, ecotourism has grown, and the granting of communal land titles is progressing, driven by a national policy on indigenous peoples' development, regularly updated since 2009. Community forestry, which involves villagers in managing and monitoring their own forest land, has also gained ground, as have the community protected areas recognised by the Ministry of Environment.

Yet these advances remain modest set against the scale of private concessions granted elsewhere in the country, and many observers point to the slow pace at which protections already written into Cambodia's land law are actually enforced. For the tapping families of Ratanakiri, Dipterocarpus resin, in the meantime, keeps trickling drop by drop into the jerrycans, as it has for generations — a thin but tenacious thread between forest and village.