This report describes an emergency drought mitigation program executed by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Vétérinaires Sans Frontières Belgium (VSF-Belgium) in Turkana District, northwestern Kenya, in early 2005. It consisted of purchasing drought-affected goats from pastoralists in the worse affected parts of the district and donating them to local schools and health centres, where the resulting meat was to be used to supplement the diet of students and in-patients.

This article describes a novel index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product piloted among pastoralists in Northern Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of poverty. We describe the methodology used to design the contract and its underlying index of predicted area-average livestock mortality, established statistically using longitudinal observations of household-level herd mortality fit to remotely sensed vegetation data.

Grassland primary productivity is the function that underpins the majority of the fodder production in cattle-rearing silvopastoral farms. Hence, understanding the factors that determine grassland productivity is critical for the design and management of silvpastoral systems. We studied the effect of two factors with documented impact on grassland productivity in seasonally dry silvopastures of Nicaragua, rainfall and trees.

Outlines some of the work being done by ILCA in the field of agroecological zonation and the use of models to predict the effect of environment on pastoral and agricultural systems. Includes plans for future developments and the potential benefits of the work.

The study was conducted with the objectives of analyzing and evaluating of lentil varieties for haulm nutritional values, determining the relationship between fodder traits and agronomic traits, and developing Near Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS) equation for predicting nutritional value of lentil haulm. The samples were collected from Debre zeit, Akaki, Chefe Donsa and Minjar field experimental sites of Debre zeit Agricultural Research Center and the laboratory work was conducted at Animal Nutrition laboratory of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Addis Ababa.

The research and development community faces the challenge of sustaining crop productivity gains, improving rural livelihoods and securing environmental sustainability in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP). This calls for a better understanding of farming systems and of rural livelihoods, particularly with the advent of, and strong advocacy for, conservation farming and resource-conserving technologies.

The research and development community faces the challenge of sustaining crop productivity gains, improving rural livelihoods and securing environmental sustainability in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP). This calls for a better understanding of farming systems and of rural livelihoods, particularly with the advent of, and strong advocacy for, conservation farming and resource-conserving technologies.

The research and development community faces the challenge of sustaining crop productivity gains, improving rural livelihoods and securing environmental sustainability in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP). This calls for a better understanding of farming systems and of rural livelihoods, particularly with the advent of, and strong advocacy for, conservation farming and resource-conserving technologies.

The research and development community faces

the challenge of sustaining crop productivity

gains, improving rural livelihoods, and securing environmental sustainability in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP). This calls for a better understanding of farming systems and of rural livelihoods, particularly with the advent of, and strong advocacy for, conservation farming and resource-conserving

technologies. This report presents a regional

The research and development community faces the challenge of sustaining crop productivity gains, improving rural livelihoods and securing environmental sustainability in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP). This calls for a better understanding of farming systems and of rural livelihoods, particularly with the advent of, and strong advocacy for, conservation farming and resource-conserving technologies.