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Zusatztext This book works well as an overview text and an introduction to the region's farming systems, illustrating the value of comparative analysis and the presentation of vignettes of particular farming systems and ecologies ... the book balances the much greater literature on West African political economy, politics, and agrarian history, in which ecological questions often take a back seat. Klappentext This book examines tropical resource management in West Africa. Drawing widely on field examples, it argues that more account should be taken of ecological conditions and indigenous land-use methods in decision-making about tropical management projects. Zusammenfassung The success of rural development schemes in Africa, particularly those involving land, is heavily dependent on understanding the local ecology. Any farmer knows this, yet rarely has development project design catered adequately for the vicissitudes of the African environment. Although environmental unpredictability was recognized in the temperate zone by the mid-nineteenth century, the ecological theory which was subsequently developed and most widely accepted, was based on concepts of norms and equilibria. History has shown that the application of such ecological assumptions to African environments is wholly inappropriate. This book argues that many methods used by West African smallholder farmers and pastoralists are properly adapted to the region's unpredictable physical environment. Field examples from the semi-arid and humid zones demonstrate the nature of environmental variability, and the skill of indigenous farmers and pastoralists in exploiting this. It is thus argued that development planners should, where possible, model development schemes on the more successful, ecologically sound methods of indigenous land management. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1: Environmental equilibrium and non-equilibrium 2: Problems and prognosis: perspectives on agriculture at a regional scale 3: Small holder adaptation: the humid domain 4: Non-equilibrium and the cocoa sector in West Africa 5: Unpredictable savannah environments 6: Farming in the semi-arid domain: adaptation to an uncertain environment 7: Rangeland and livestock management 8: Conclusions ...
