What happens after drums filled with the fragrant oil leave mills in the Amazon and are exported, however, is not always clear. Environmental groups say that much of the oil is routed through a handful of brokers, many based in the New York area, but those intermediaries are reluctant to talk about how and where they obtain the product and how they manage to comply with the Brazilian government's strict regulations.

According to academic and industry studies, legal rosewood oil production in Brazil today is barely one tenth of the peak annual output of 300 tons, in the late 1960s. The number of registered mills, which turn rosewood tree trunks into oil through an inefficient process at a ratio of 100 to one, has also fallen drastically, from more than 50 in the 1940s to less than 8.

About six years ago, though, a community group in Silves, a small island town in the middle of the Amazon River, began an effort to try to revive the industry, this time on a sustainable basis. Rather than simply cut down trees and haul away their trunks, the group, called Avive, decided to prune branches and leaves every five years or so, thereby extending the usefulness of individual rosewood trees for decades.

Today the project, which began with money from the World Wildlife Fund and has also been supported by the British and German governments, has 42 members, most of them peasant women. They have planted and now are tending more than 3,000 rosewood saplings in the heart of the jungle and distill rosewood oil and manufacture about 1,000 bars of soap a month at a small plant here.

"My husband used to work at one of the mills, and there they take out the tree and leave nothing in its place," said Anéte de Souza Canto, a leader of the group. "Not us. I'm 47 years old and have five daughters, so I'm thinking of the future."

In an effort to further plumb the riches of the rain forest, the group has also begun harvesting other exotic fragrances from trees for soaps and salves, always taking care to replace what they take. "Everything that smells good, we're planting," Marcio Joao Neves da Batista, who operates the distillery that boils leaves and branches into oil, said.

But Avive's task has not proven easy. Jungle lots that the government has placed under the group's care have been razed, with invaders simply cutting down and hauling away trunks from mature trees standing as tall as 30 meters, or 100 feet, that the cooperative had hoped to use in production for years.