The relationship between biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation has always been uneasy. The debate has gone backwards and forwards over many years and the editors of this compilation of key readings and Earthscan are to be thanked for bringing together a useful selection of key papers in a single volume. The editors (Dilys Roe and Joanna Elliot) have carefully structured the Reader to cover a range of important issues and provide a clear and helpful commentary on the individual articles.

They focus deliberately on the links between conservation and poverty rather than on the wider debate on the links between biodiversity and poverty and identify three specific areas of debate which govern their choice of articles for the book: the lack of attention given to biodiversity conservation on the development agenda; the apparently increasing protectionist focus of conservation policy; and the activities and accountability of the big international conservation NGOs and their impacts on local and indigenous communities.

Many of the articles are thought provoking and likely to stimulate renewed discussion on the difficult questions that confront those interested in this topic. However, I confess to a personal disappointment that there is not more on agricultural aspects. I suspect this reflects the fact that agriculture is seen as an essentially negative force by those involved in conservation and that there has been little writing on the part that biodiversity in agricultural production systems will have to play both in supporting conservation and in alleviating poverty in sustainable ways.