Building soil conservation practices on a base of indigenous knowledge greatly increases the rate at which they are adopted by farmers in Burkina Faso. Indigenous soil conservation practices are ecologically sound and need to be taken into account when efforts are made to introduce modern agricultural techniques.

Full text of the Convention to Combat Desertification, which was elaborated by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INCD) and signed in June 1994.Also available from the CCD WWW site in French and English

Recent arguments have stated that the new livestock development policy will carry a high social cost, that the reality of range degradation in Botswana has been ignored, and that there is no basis for assuming that de-stocking would decrease the productivity of rangeland.

A useful debate is developing over carrying capacity and the degradation of communal rangelands in sub-Saharan Africa. With a few lonely exceptions, scientists and policy-makers have in the past claimed that degradation is universal and livestock productivity lowered because of overstocking on communal range. This position has been mainly dogmatic.

Paper attempts to dispel some of the confusion surrounding the application of the range degradation concept in Botswana. It has three objectives. First, to present the current thinking of range ecologists vis-a-vis range degradation. Second, to dismiss recent arguments that range degradation in Botswana is insignificant.

Inadequate feed supplies remain a major constraint to sustainable cattle production in general, and milk production in particular, in smallholder production systems throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Such is the vagary of rainfall throughout Africa's rangelands that almost all pastoral communities face cycles of good and hardship years.