Tea is a unique crop and, incidentally, a very interesting and attractive one. The tea bush, its cultivation and harvesting do not fit into any typical cropping pattern. Moreover, its processing and marketing are specific to tea. Thus the Tea Industry stands apart and constitutes a self contained entity. This is reflected in the title given to this book, Tea: Cultivation to consumption, and its treatment of the subject. The book is logically planned - starting with the plant itself and finishing with the traditional'cuppa'. Every aspect of tea production is covered, inevitably some in greater detail than others. However, it gives an authentic and comprehensive picture of the tea industry. The text deals in detail with cultural practices and research, where desirable, on a regional basis. The technology of tea cultivation and processing has been developed within the industry, aided by applied research which was largely financed by the tea companies themselves. This contributed to a technically competent industry but tended to bypass the more academic and fundamental investigations which might bring future rewards. The sponsorship of research has now widened and the range and depth of tea research has increased accordingly. The editors and authors of this book have played their part in these recent developments which are well reported in the book.

Tanga Region, Tanzania, is an area of persistent rural poverty with a long history of drought, floods, food shortages, famine, and social and economic disruption. Though farmers have been cultivating the land there for hundreds of years, they have consistently been unable to supply adequate food for the region's inhabitants. In Challenging Nature, Philip Porter examines eighteen farming communities to understand what the farmers there know about their environment and which historical and economic factors play into the lack of food security. Porter first began work on this project in 1972, asking 250 farmers in the region about life history, environmental and agricultural changes, types of crops grown and methods of planting, environmental assessments, agricultural practices, food and water supplies, training and education, and attitudes toward nature. Twenty years later, he returned and reinterviewed as many farmers as could be found from the first survey. The result contextualizes the environmental history of the region while informing current and future agricultural development.

This book explores how and why the idea of the African environmental crisis developed and persisted through colonial and post-colonial periods, and why it has been so influential in development discourse. From the beginnings of imperial administration, the idea of the desiccation of African environments grew in popularity, but this crisis discourse was dominated by the imposition of imperial scientific knowledge, neglecting indigenous knowledge and experience. African Environmental Crisis provides a synthesis of more than one-and-a-half century’s research on peasant agriculture and pastoral rangeland development in terms of soil erosion control, animal husbandry, grazing schemes, large-scale agricultural schemes, social and administrative science research, and vector-disease and pest controls. Drawing on comparative socio-ecological perspectives of African peoples across the East African colonies and post-independent states, this book refutes the hypothesis that African peoples were responsible for environmental degradation. Instead, Gufu Oba argues that flawed imperial assumptions and short-term research projects generated an inaccurate view of the environment in Africa. This book’s discussion of the history of science for development provides researchers across environmental studies, agronomy, African history and development studies with a lens through which to understand the underlying assumptions behind development projects in Africa.