Abstract: With the research of sustainable agriculture and rural development (SARD) in the world, appraising situation of SARD and monitoring the trendy of sustaining development is a vital topic. Although the index system of appraising on SARD is different with different national condition, the principles of appraising on SARD should be identical. Five items of principles was discussed in the paper. Based on these principles, taking Turpan oasis as one case, the index system of appraising on SARD of arid area is built in the paper. Meanwhile with thinking of close and complicated relationships between agriculture and rural economy, their appraising index system could be divided into two part. One part of the index system for appraising oasis agriculture was consist of 51 indexes, the other one for appraising oasis rural development was consist of 46 indexes. Through collecting related data and applying method of AHP, the appraising result is that the situation of agriculture and rural development is weak (credit is 0.6377 and 0.6781), and some key restrict factors are discussed in it. Firstly, water resource is inherently scarce and further was irrationally utilized human being. At present Aidinghu lake had started to shrink with the decreasing of amount of water to enter lake, serious environmental crisis influenced sustainable development of oasis agriculture and rural economy. Secondly, Turpan oasis locates in isolated region and is far away from national market, and its regional market of agricultural products is underdeveloped. These factors restrict oasis rural development. Thirdly, nationality connotation and population quality also is vital factor. Turpan oasis is an assembling area of Uygur nationality, exchanging process between mult-i nationalities will have lagging effects to some policies. Fourthly, the idea of regional governmental administrators is backward and conservative. Lastly, fund launching into regional economy is rare, and restricts regional economy development.

Key words: Turpan oasis, sustainable agriculture and rural economy, index system of appraising