The impact of human endeavours on the environment in the struggle to eke out a living through crop and animal agriculture is examined in a holistic context. Analyses focus on all the sources of pressure that modify the vegetation cover of rural Africa, including the effects of fires and burning of biomass, fuel wood extraction and deforestation and land clearing.

This corporate report looks ‘back to the future’—to the thousand million farmers practicing small-scale mixed crop-and-livestock agriculture in poor countries—the kind of seemingly old-fashioned family farming systems that have become so fashionable in recent years among those wanting to reform the industrial food systems of rich countries.

This handy glossary (giving French equivalents of alphabetically listed English terms but not vice versa), was compiled by staff at the ILCA French Copy Unit in Addis Ababa over a period of more than 10 years, and is sure to become a most useful aid for translators, interpreters and scientists working in the various fields of animal agriculture (including feed crop production).