Tanzania’s Sisal Archive: 126 Years of Production Data, and What It Actually Shows

Sisal.tz has carried a disclaimer suggesting Tanzania sisal data is broadly scarce. That framing does not survive contact with the Tanzania Sisal Board’s own published record: a production series running from 1898 to 2023, fetched directly from sisalboard.go.tz (not the dead tsb.go.tz domain prior lookups tried). This is one of the longest continuous agricultural production series available for any Tanzanian export crop.

A world-record year, and a world war gap

Production was negligible at the start — 0.6 tonnes in 1898 and 1899 — and crossed 100,000 tonnes for the first time in 1938. The series genuinely has no figures for 1915 and 1916, marked simply "World War I" in the Board’s own table — a real gap, not a retrieval failure. The peak came in 1964 at 230,000 tonnes, a year the Board’s own table flags as the world’s highest production ever reached. That single year’s output is close to the entire world’s total sisal production in 2024 (FAOSTAT: 233,961 tonnes) — a useful way to grasp how dominant Tanzanian sisal once was. FAOSTAT independently corroborates Tanzania as the world’s #1 sisal producer every year from 1961 to 1969.

The long decline, and the recent floor

From the 1964 peak, production fell for three decades, bottoming around 20,000-21,000 tonnes in the late 1990s/early 2000s, before a slow recovery. The most recent year in the Board’s series, 2023, shows 56,773 tonnes — more than double the 2009 trough (21,057t) and the highest figure since 1991.

What is still genuinely scarce

None of this closes every gap. Four limits are real and worth stating plainly rather than working around: no official producer price for Tanzania sisal has ever been published by FAOSTAT; no auction or spot clearing price exists anywhere — every published figure, including the Sisal Board’s own, is explicitly "indicative," never a recorded transaction; sisal has had no dedicated international trade (HS) code since 2007, so it cannot be isolated in global trade databases after that year; and Tanzania’s national agricultural survey (AASS) dropped sisal from its two most recent editions entirely.

Where the figures disagree

The Sisal Board’s own series and FAOSTAT’s independently-compiled one diverge somewhat at both ends of the timeline, most plausibly because of a season-vs-calendar-year labeling difference rather than a factual disagreement. Export-volume figures from the Sisal Board and Bank of Tanzania customs data differ by up to roughly 2.9x in some years — different universes (licensing/board records vs. customs declarations), not a simple error either source. Both are shown on this site rather than one being silently preferred.

Sources: Tanzania Sisal Board, "Sisal Fibre Production from 1898 to 2023" (sisalboard.go.tz); FAOSTAT production and trade bulk data, 2026 retrieval.