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.

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.

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.

This paper presents an update on an initiative by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), on the development and promotion of regional strategic food and agricultural commodities value chains in Africa. The cornerstone of the approach to the implementation of this initiative is a pilot scheme in two Regional Economic Communities (RECs), the Common Market for Eastern

With the goal of stimulating the production and utilisation of indigenous cereals, rootss tubers and legumes in particular sorghum in composite flours for bakery products in traditional, new and modified food products it will have the following objectives^

a) ensure better understanding of the importance and potential

for industrial application of sorghums etc. and the technologies

available for milling and baking coarse grains'

b) ascertain the status and plans of existing 'national composite

flour programmes or the possibilities of establishing such

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.