From the WSJ:
At the Top of Texas Catholic Superstore in Amarillo, owner Moneisa Thompson said she noticed one-ounce packages of frankincense disappearing from displays in her 3,800-square-foot store about four months ago. She has since moved the packages into a glass case.
"We'd go through the count and we'd come up one or two short," Ms. Thompson said. "We had to put it under lock and key."
Frankincense comes from a tree called the bowellia tree, which grows in the horn of Africa. The problem is:
While the trees historically grew from the southern Arabian peninsula to the Horn of Africa, they are now found mostly in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and India. "There is no real sustainable management of forests" in East Africa, said Frans Bongers, a Dutch ecologist at Wageningen University and one of the authors of the study. "There are no new trees coming into the system. All trees are dying, continuously."
Part of the problem is farmers burning down the trees to make way for grazing lands for their cattle. Of the trees that haven't been destroyed, he said 85% are "heavily infested by one or more long-horned beetles" that bore into the wood of adult boswellia and eat them from the inside.
It's not clear to me that the beetle problem isn't also partly a problem with the tragedy of the commons.
