Stakes and pitfalls of the development of the statistical systems in agriculture: the hank of sustainable development. Dominique Desbois (Inra/Scees) & Abdoulaye Adam (African Development Bank) 1 / 20 Stakes and pitfalls of the development of the statistical systems in agriculture: the web of sustainable development. * DESBOIS, Dominique INRA / Service Central des Enquêtes et Etudes Statistiques TSA 70007, 93555 Montreuil sous Bois Cedex, France. E-mail: dominique.desbois@agriculture.gouv.fr ADAM, Abdoulaye African Development Bank BP 323, 1002 Tunis, Belvédère, Tunisia. E-mail: a.adam@afdb.org “I will conclude with a final observation about the importance of indicators [….] Therefore, by implication, we play a critical role in measuring the effectiveness of public policy and private business decisions that influence national agricultural performance.” R. Ronald Bosecker International Interests In Agricultural And Rural Statistics ICAS III “Measuring Sustainable Agriculture Indicators” The sustainable character of the economic development process ranks among the most critical issues of the statistical system integration into their economic environment. Indeed, the World Summit for Sustainable Development, organised in Johannesburg from 26 th August 2002to 4 th September, reaffirms the commitment of the international community for sustainable development and invites in its analysis and statistics action plan 1 to reinforce the national and regional information services which refer to the policies and measurements of sustainable development (§ 129), while encouraging further work on the indicators (§ 130 and 131). 1 The genesis of the sustainable development concept In the recent history of the theories of economic development, the concept of sustainability is for the first time explicitly associated with that of growth by the economist Walt Whitman Rostow to qualify one of the phases of economic development while speaking about the takeoff towards self- sustained growth 2 . The problems of sustainable development are already embedded in the Club of Rome 3 theses about the limits to growth 4 , which will be spread at the end of the Sixties by the Meadows report. During the Seventies, in answer to this radical calling into question of the development idea , taking the environment into account as a critical factor is establishing through the development of strategies of ecological development or “ecodevelopment” 5 . A concept suggested in 1987 by the United Nations, sustainable development is defined as a type of development likely to ensure the needs for the present generations without compromising the * The authors thank Georges Decaudin, sub-director for the statistics of farms and forest with SCEES, Christian Gay, operations manager for international affairs at SCEES and Céline Rouquette sub-director for syntheses and incomes with SCEES, for their attentive second reading of this text, while remaining the sole responsible for the possible errors or omissions. 1 cf. http://www.agora21.org/johannesburg/rapports/plan-action.pdf, Means of execution, p. 76. 2 W.W.Rostow (1956) “The Takeoff into Growth Coil-Sustained”, Economic Newspaper, n°66, pp. 25-48. 3 The Club of Rome, founded on 1968 April 8, by Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King, is a non-governmental organisation sensitising the governmental leaders with the complex problems of the development (http://www.clubofrome.org). 4 The Limits to Growth. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Universe Books, New York, 1972. 5 Strategies reaffirming the objective of the development in a reorientation of the priorities and methods integrating environmental protection and of the natural resources, cf. Sachs, I. (1974). “Environnement et styles de développement”, Annales - Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, (3), pp. 553-570. Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark.