As the world reviews its progress in tackling global poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), drylands can no longer be ignored. Drylands account for more than a third of the world’s land surface and more than 2 billion of its people. Yet for too long, drylands and their inhabitants have been neglected in development processes.

La terre — une ressource vitale pour la population mondiale

The paper is divided into four chapters. The frist chapter is the introduction. Chapter two discusses the conceptualisation of the farming system with reference to the livestock component and reviews some alternative typologies that have been employed or proposed. A typological framework that is consistent with ILCA's objectives is then outlined. Chapter 3 develops a regionalisation of the semi arid zones of sub-Saharan Africa in four orders of increasing scale. The first order sub-division is between "West and North" and "East and South" geographical regions.

The papers in this proceedings provide a cross section of science research in international agricultural research centres (IARCs), where the objectives and research foci within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have changed substantially in the 1990s. The book is divided in five sections. The first explores priority setting and research evaluation of commodity programmes. The second looks at institutional issues. The third explores issues related to commodity policies and food security.

An inter-institutional and multi-disciplinary project to identify Brachiaria genotypes, which combine waterlogging tolerance with high forage yield and quality, for use in agricultural land in Latin America with poor drainage, is underway. The aim is to improve meat and milk production and mitigate the impacts of climate change in the humid areas of Latin America. Researchers at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) have developed a screening method to evaluate waterlogging in grasses. Using this method, 71 promising hybrids derived from the species,

Summarises the work that ILCA is doing to assemble what information is available on livestock breeds and breeding in sub-Saharan Africa.