Sisal wallcovering

Sisal is a tough plant. It can thrive in drought conditions and in rough land with very little nutrition. For example, in 100 years of commercial sisal growing in Tanzania there has not been a year when there was a drought to kill sisal plants but there have been years when lack of rain devastated many other crops. Drought is the worst enemy of agriculture in many of the developing economies, which rely heavily on rain fed agriculture.
It has very few diseases which in most cases does not need any pesticides. It helps to stop soil erosion and captures moisture from the atmosphere. It can be planted any time of the year and harvested throughout the year. It even survives fire. There are very few commercially grown plants in the world with these qualities.
These are very serious advantages for an agricultural product especially in poor areas which are continually ravaged by drought, plant diseases, bush fires; where agriculture is the mainstay of their economies but is still primitive and has no protection of state subsidies or insurance.
The concentration of development has been in the utilization of the fibre. Only 2 percent of the plant is extracted as fibre. In the worldwide production of fibre of 300 000 tons, about 15 000 000 million tons is the biomass and short fibres called "waste".
Research has been going on to establish how best to exploit this huge quantity of biomass commercially.