This study attempts to identify the main obstacles to progress and the developments possible. It would therefore be wrong to consider it as a first agricultural plan for Africa, similar to the one called for recently by the Ghanaian Ministry of Agriculture.

This document focused on the land and environmental degradation and desertification in Africa; issues and options for sustainable economic development with transformation.

The countries of circum-Sahara Africa adversely affected by desertification, their sub-regional organisations, their Northern partners and the concerned international organisations of the United Nations System have created the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS) in May 1992. OSS's mission is conducted within the international framework of the Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) and Agenda 21 and aims to favour the development and the optimisation of its African partners' information wealth, for an optimal use of the means for combating desertification.

The adoption of Agenda 2063 at the continental level, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the global level, requires a high level of collection and collation of quality, timely, reliable and dis-aggregated data at all levels of the development process, including land, to inform decisions, enable all stakeholders to track progress and make the necessary adjustments to ensure transparency and mutual accountability in the continent and globally.

The lack of balanced development where economic, social and environmental dimensions are given due consideration for long term sustainable development has led the international community to consider different paradigms of development. The multiple challenges to development in Africa have necessitated the use of a holistic approach that integrates economic, social and environmental dimensions, and generates new knowledge, policies and actions.

At the Third Meeting of the UNDAT Committee of Officials tabled proposals suggesting that scope existed for multinational cooperation in creating and developing rural settlements between Zambia's Northern Province and Tanzania Mbeya and Rukwa Regions, all of which fall within the hinterland of the international Tanzania - Zambia Railway (TAZARA)

This paper concentrates more on the indicators that deal more or less directly with the increase of agricultural productivity and production. There is the fundamental constraint then that because of the imprecise nature of some of the factors to be measured, the indicators themselves may not in fact be measuring what they were meant to measure. However, this does not relieve the user of constructor of indicators from the obligation to offer a hypothesis as a start and then work to the final “theorem” for that is what all indicators at the start are hypothesis.

The project identification, preparation, appraisal and loan negotiation capabilities of the Research and Planning Section of the MOAC should be further strengthened preferably with technical assistance from outside.

The paper deals with land tenure and economic development in Upper Volta. .The entire country lies within the savannah zone which runs down West Africa, from Cape Verde, to Chad, from the Saharan. Sahel in the North to the forest zones bordering the Atlantic in the South.