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 annual report takes as its theme the central challenge facing the institute and its partners at the start of the new millennium: making the livestock revolution work for the poor. It is a companion report to the institutes new strategic plan, which takes the revolution as its basis in determining how ILRI's programme should evolve in the first decade of the 21st century. The report begins and ends on a farm in central Ethiopia, whose mixed crop-livestock producers are just beginning to participate in the expanding dairy market of the country's capital, Addis Ababa.