I wish to acknowledge the substantial help I received from a number of people in carrying out this research work. In the study countries, the following people shared their knowledge of the livestock subsector without reservation and helped in the task of data collection: Kamagate Mamadou and Mody Barry (Côte d'Ivoire); Dr Fernard Traore, Abou Doumbia and Tapsirou Maiga (Mali); Uka Amogu and Wole Ajayi (Nigeria); Dr Osman Bashary, Professor Babiker E. Musa and Dr Y. El Naim (Sudan); Tobias Takavarasha and Felix Masanzu (Zimbabwe). To all of them I offer my sincere thanks.
I also wish to express my gratitude to Stephen Sandford for initiating this research and for providing useful insights at various stages of the study. His criticisms and insistence on clarity have helped to remove a number of ambiguities from the original draft and contributed to an improvement of the final paper. Pradeep Itty read parts of the paper and I am grateful to him for pointing out certain errors in the original draft. Thanks are also due to Professor Lawrence D. Smith and Dr Allan Low for their thoughtful and objective reviews of a draft of this paper. Almaz Zewdie, Tsehainesh Zewdu and Woinshet Mekonnen typed successive versions of the paper with accuracy and patience, while Senait Seyoum and Alemayehu Konde provided invaluable editorial assistance.
A major part of this work was conducted while the author was a Visiting Fellow at the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA). The fellowship and part of the field work were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation under its Social Science Research Fellowship Programme in Agriculture. The support provided by the Foundation is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
Finally, the views expressed here are those of the author. No one but the author should be blamed for the remaining errors and deficiencies of the paper.
