Describes the characteristics of dairy production and processing in South Darfur and provides an analysis of the way in which pastoral families vary their diets according to seasonal food shortages and shifting terms of trade between milk and food grains.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a new index-based livestock insurance (IBLI)

product designed to compensate for area average predicted livestock mortality loss in

northern Kenya, where previous work has established the presence of poverty traps. We

simulate household-specific wealth dynamics based on a model parameterized using rich

panel and experimental data from the region. The simulations allow us to investigate

patterns of willingness to pay for asset index insurance that is imperfectly correlated with

This paper examines a process - the spontaneous enclosure of the range by livestock owners - which may rise new problems but also permit new approaches to the development of the African livestock industry. Drawing on case material from Sudan and Somalia, the opening section of the paper discusses some of the spontaneous range enclosure.

Explains to what extent effective traditional African range management systems exist/existed, and discusses the factors which influence their incidence, persistence or effectiveness - focussing principally on sub-Saharan Africa.

Describes, briefly, sizes structures, general management and productivity of pastoral herds in the Kaduna Plains of Nigeria. Includes data on age at first calving, calving percentage, calving intervals, calf liveweight & mortality to 1 year, and milk yield of Bunaji cattle under this sedentary pastoral management system. Identifies nutrition as cause of this below-genetic-potential productivity.

Sustainable development of pastoral and agro-pastoral systems, dominated by collective and/or tribal ownership of rangelands, is a key issue for the West Asia and North Africa region. These two systems are located in arid and semi-arid areas and are increasingly threatened by desertification process. The policy responses to tackle this complexity have been a sectorial and fragmented, “top-down” approach, putting forward technical solutions and neglecting the social context.

Somalia, one of the world's poorest countries, has livestock as the mainstay of the economy, with an estimated 65% of the population engaged in the livestock sector. This paper presents a gendered study on the traditional livestock breeding practices of Somali pastoralists for camels, cattle, sheep and goats, with a focus on documenting livestock traits of importance, the criteria used to select male breeding animals and the criteria used to cull female breeding animals.

Improved understandings of the agricultural and range ecologies of semi-arid Africa require better information on the spatiotemporal distribution of domestic livestock across agropastoral landscapes. An empirical GIS-based approach was developed for estimating distributions of herded livestock across three agropastoral territories (around 100 km2 each) over a two-year period.