This study was conducted in the rural kebeles around Dire Dawa for designing a simple, yet, feasible breeding scheme in the context of community-based management of animal genetic resources. Range of participatory rural appraisal tools, including focal group discussions and participatory mappings, were employed to study the local community’s Indigenous knowledge and practices in managing the goat gene pool. The breeding objective and local trait preferences were defined in a participatory manner through own-flock ranking experiments. The community generally practices selective pure breeding where by the own flock and flocks in the neighbourhood were the units of selection for bucks. There are social regulations in the community against sale of breeding does outside the community while encouraging communal use of outstanding breeding males. Goats are kept for multifaceted purposes ranging from products like milk, meat and live-sale to functions in socio-cultural, financial and ritual state of affairs. The breeding objective is to ensure improved milk production, through increased daily yield per doe and increased fertility per flock, and increased net income per flock, through increased number of marketable animals. Traditional criteria such as conformation, behaviour and adaptation were as important as most “production” traits in selecting breeding animals. The breeding goal traits considered were, accordingly, milk production, conformation and reproductive traits. Based on these findings, village breeding schemes, where-by flocks and breeding groups in a village are taken as focal points, is recommended as way forward in genetic improvement. The framework for a feasible implementation of such genetic improvement scheme is outlined based on the rationale of utilizing available social regulations, indigenous knowledge and traditional systems of breeding as well as future market prospects.

Pig production has increasingly become an important activity, especially among smallholder farmers in Uganda in the past three decades as evidenced by a dramatic rise in pig population from 0.19 to 3.2 million. This is linked to the rise in demand for pork due to changes in preferences. Per capita consumption of pork has been estimated at 3.4 kg/person/year representing a ten-fold increase in the last 30 years. Pigs are important assets for the poor smallholders in Uganda generating income for meeting planned and emergency household financial needs. Despite its importance, the smallholder pig systems are faced with a number of productivity and market related constraints ranging from diseases, poor nutrition and poorly organized markets. Strong growth opportunities to improve smallholder pig systems exist if the constraints are minimized. However the constraints and opportunities vary among smallholder producers as they are not a homogenous group and are affected by various factors. This paper applies a cluster analysis to characterize smallholder pig production systems into typologies in three districts in Uganda by utilizing village level data from 35 villages. The paper further explores the constraints and opportunities for the different typologies to engage with output and input market systems. The paper concludes that different interventions are necessary to improve market linkages with the smallholder pig production systems due to their varying differences in terms of farmers’ cooperative involvement, institutional linkages and intensification related indicators.

The study was conducted to evaluate the productive and reproductive performance of Central Highland and Woyto-Guji goat breeds in Meta-Robi and Konso districts, respectively. A total of 240 farmers were interviewed using semi-structured questionnaires to describe kidding pattern, kidding interval, weaning age and milk production. On-farm performance traits were recorded on 730 goats of 157 households. In Konso, majority of kidding occurred in May, whereas in Meta-Robi it was in September. There was a difference in the average kidding interval and age at weaning between the breeds. Kids birth weight (2.03 Vs. 2.68kg) and does postpartum weight (26.6 Vs. 28.2kg) were lower in Woyto-Guji goats than in Central Highland goats. Average 90 day kids' weight and average daily weight gain between birth and 90 days were not different among the breeds. Average 180 day weight (15.7 Vs. 11.5kg) and average daily weight gain between 91 and 180 days (65.4 Vs. 31.9 g/day) were better in Central Highland goats than in Woyto-Guji goats.

A knowledge of the level of genetic diversity is very important in ensuring the sustainable utilisation of animal genetic resources. To this end, the genetic diversity of some local pigswas assessed by genotyping 86 unrelated pigs in four regions of Ghana namely Northern (Tingoli = 9), Upper West (Papu = 31 and Babile = 32) and Upper East (Gia = 14) using 12 microsatellite markers.The number of alleles (Na), number of effective alleles (Ne), observed heterozygosity (Ho), expected heterozygosity (He) and inbreeding coefficient (FIS) were used to assess the level of genetic differentiation among the five populations in this study. All loci studied were polymorphic and the mean number of alleles ranged from 4.58 (Yorkshire) to 10.58 (Papu) with an overall average of 7.65 alleles. At all the 12 loci studied, inbreeding coefficient (FIS) deviated significantly from zero with a mean of 0.32. When the Nei’s standard genetic distance based on the proportions of shared alleles was used to construct a neighbour joining tree, pigs from the different communities sampled in the Upper West region emerged with the highest bootstrap value of 90%. Generally, the sampled pigs represent distinct populations with a moderate amount (12%) of genetic differentiation but considerable amount of inbreeding (29%) has taken place within these populations over the years. This is the first report of the genetic diversity of Ghanaian local pigs using microsatellite markers.

The mode of ownership of chicken in the family was various types, for instance shared ownership constituted about (57%) followed by individual ownership (43%) among the members of the households. More than around 70% of overall care-taking of chickens, feeding of chickens, cleaning of birds-quarter, treating of sick birds, decision for off take of poultry products were the responsibility of women. The major criteria used for judging of the price of local chickens were body weight (34.2%), plumage color (33.3%) and comp-type (32.4%). Fluctuations in the prices of the village chicken and chicken-products were mainly due to purchasing power of the consumers (33.4), fasting (33.2), and availability of products (32.5%). Almost all farmers were selling their chicken and chicken products in local markets.

Zemgale planning region divides into two intra-regions (Zemgale 1 and Zemgale 2) by natural, soil and other agricultural resources. Each intra-region has different size of farms. The aim of the research was to find the structure of rural economy in different size farms or rural enterprises of Zemgale 1 and Zemgale 2 intra-regions. The research showed that very small farms dominate grow-plant sectors production. Medium size farms and enterprises have solid high proportion of grow-plant sector production in total production value. This proportion is even higher in biggest agricultural enterprises and companies (100 is less than or equal 250 ESU). In general author has stated that in Zemgale 1, which is the biggest agricultural production territory in Latvia, grow-plant production sectors dominate.

Recently we have been noticing words as 'sustainable development', 'environment protection', 'environmentally friendly' etc more and more often. We understand meaning of those concepts, but there are no unambiguous definitions of these words in literature. Each of these notions includes particular characterizing elements which understanding and characterizing of which make possible to detect correctness of application or context. Sustainability like entrepreneurship is a process which takes place within definite environment around it. Mutual interaction of the processes produces consequences which have to satisfy all the interested parties. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate several science branches to solve this problem- i. e. economics and ecology. Nowadays, environment issues become part of each person, institution, policy and law. Environmental questions are integrated in different fields of economics and entrepreneurship, as well. It is hard to define environmentally friendly entrepreneurship. But there is a flexible definition that could be used in different economical spheres with great variability of economical circumstances, and it is- characterised circumstances would not be secured for a long time, yet. It is complicated to define the concept since this is a value involving process. Values which are sources for idea of sustainable development are based on need to form society satisfying human interests and unthreatening future generations, necessity to secure economical growth including moral, social and ecological aspects.

The present article reviews part of a research paper on regional differences in evaluating economic growth and the various aspects that influence it. In this publication, the relationship between changes in corruption level and economic growth is analyzed, paying close regard to all countries of the world and taking Europe separately as a region with relatively consistent economic and social development levels. The author analyzes the average values and changes in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita based on purchasing-power-parity valuation (in US dollars) for 1998 – 2005 and the corruption perception index (CPI) of 1998 – 2007. When looking at data from all countries of the world and European countries, no interrelation can be observed between changes in CPI and GDP per capita. These values fluctuate independently of each other. The obtained results give rise to doubt whether CPI is a suitable indicator for determining the corruption level. The author concludes that assertions of negative (or positive) influence that corruption is said to have on GDP increase should be taken very critically.

This study was conducted to investigate the lifestyle of post-graduate students. The purpose of the present study was to find out opinion of the post-graduate students how significant are physical activities and healthy eating in their life. The study was initiated due to the growing knowledge of the importance of healthy food. The study was carried out by using empirical methods and the opinion of post-graduate students living in Latvia analysed. The authors have used questionnaire method and in February 2008 received answers from 86 respondents who are the post-graduate students of Latvia University of Agriculture (LLU). Studies showed that the biggest part of research subjects appreciates the importance of physical activities and healthy eating, and treats it as a positive part of the post-graduate studies process.

This paper discusses the continuous field view of representing geography and its role in forest inventory. Describing all forest attributes at any location or point and storing this information in digital databases, as an alternative to store forest compartments as vector polygons and associated attributes, is considered to be important for development of remote sensing and GIS applications for forest inventories. Main results achieved following this approach during the last decade in Lithuanian university of agriculture are described. Special research polygon near Kaunas was developed. Four auxiliary data sources (Spot Xi, Landsat TM, digital aerial photos and stand-wise inventory material), three estimators (two-phase sampling with stratification, the k-nearest neighbours and regression) as well as different methods for auxiliary data integration were examined to get point-wise forest characteristics. The lowest root mean square errors at a level of virtual sample point using optimal implementation tactics are – for mean diameter 24 %, height 18%, age 28%, basal area 37%, volume per 1 ha 40% and percentage of coniferous trees 29% of the mean value of corresponding forest characteristic. Integrating additional auxiliary information – characteristics of forest compartments, estimated during the conventional stand-wise inventory – and satellite images improved the overall estimation accuracy. Pre-stratification of sample plots using the attributes of compartments improved the estimation accuracy for certain stand groups. A new approach of segmentation, aimed to construct conventional forest compartments – estimation of point-wise forest characteristics for every pixel of satellite imagery and using them instead of original image values – was suggested and investigated.