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The African economies have been bedevilled by major climatic and environmental crisis 
during the past fifteen years. Drought and desertification has become a frequent, if nota perma- 
nent, phenomenon tor countries of the Sahel and of Eastern, Southern and North Africa. Cyclo- 
nes are a common and frequent occurrences for the Indian Ocean countries. On the whole, 
Africa has experienced serious degradation in its environment. The economic saga which has un- 
folded on the continent in the 1980s has been characterized by high-level of unemployment in- 
cluding graduate and school leavers unemployment, high population growth rates, high and rising 
costs of energy, deteriorating terms of trade, the collapse in commodity export market, balance 
of payments disequilibria and mounting debts and debt serv icing burdens. The cumulative effect 
of all these is falling standards of iiving for the average African. For example, between 1980 and 
1984, GDP at constant prices grew at an average annual rate of only 1.0 per cent, in the face of 
an annual average population growth rate of about 3.0 per cent, leading to an annual average 
decline in real per capita income of about 1.9 per cent over the same period. 
At the root of African's economic backwardness, stagnation and decline lies the poor perfor- 
mance of the agricultural sector. And at the root of the poor performance of the sector is the per- 
vasive low level of productivity which is partly the result of low level of technology and.the very 
limited application of science to agricultural development in Africa. Available estimates show 
that the average annual growth rates of agricultural production decreased sharply from 2.7 per 
cent during the 1960s to 2.0 per cent in the 1970s and was 1.7 per cent between 1978 and 1984. 
Like the agricultural sector the other components of the directly productive sectors — mining 
and manufacturing — have suffered persistent and disastrous declines in their rates of growth in 
the 1980s, so much so that rather than provide the dynamic forces for the structural transforma- 
tion of the African economy, they have intensified the dependency syndrome of Africa. 
On top of the continent's paralysis of multiple debilitating crisis, particularly the low level 
of productivity of African agriculture, was the drought-induced emergency situation in a large 
number of African countries in the three years 1983—1985, with the attendant tragedies of dea- 
ths of hundreds of thousands of people, of massive displacements of population, of deaths of 
hundreds of thousands of domestic and wild animals and a permanent degradation of extensive 
areas of Africa's arable land. Given Africa's low level of technological capability, the Great 
African Drought of 1983— 1985 caught the continent, as it were, with its pants down — by sur- 
prise and unprepared. 
It will thus be clear that there can be no doubt about the dire situation faced by African 
economies, and the need to greatly enhance the capacity of Africa to cope with current and futu- 
re crises. There can also be no doubt about the crucial role which science and technology will 
have to play in the economic rehabilitation, recovery and development of the devastated African 
economies. Indeed. the successful implementation of African’s Priority Programme for Economic 
Recovery, 1986— 1990) (APPER) adopted in July 1985 by African Heads of State and Govern- 
ment and of the United Nations Programme of Action for Africa's economic recovery and deve- 
lopment (UN-PAAERD) depend largely on the intensive and extensive application of science and 
technology to the solution of Africa's physical, environmental, climatic and development prob- 
lems. 
In this connection, photogrammetry and remote sensing have very significant contributions 
to make, especially in such areas as agriculture and food production, soil conservation and crop 
yield forecasting, land cover and land use management, forestry ana rangeland management, 
mineral resources prospecting, water resources development (rural and urban), control of deser- 
tification, environmental monitoring (including early warning systems) and prevention of hazards 
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