Under low and variable rainfall conditions, efficient soil moisture management is a good way for improving water-use efficiency. Recognising the importance of soil moisture, an electronic conference was organised to identify, describe, discuss and promote actions that will assist farmers to improve water-use efficiency in rainfed agriculture and drought-proof their system. The present publication contains an analytic summary of the conference discussions, abstracts of papers submitted during the conference and discussion papers prepared to introduce the different topics. In keeping with the electronic character of the workshop, the full documentation is included on the CD-ROM that accompanies this publication.

System requirements to use the CD-ROM: PC with Intel Pentium (R) processor and Microsoft (R) Windows 95 / 98 / 2000 / Me / NT / XP, or Apple Macintosh with PowerPC (R) processor and Mac OS (R) 8.6 / 9.0.4 / 9.1 / X; 64 MB of RAM; 50MB of available hard-disk space; Adobe Acrobat (R) Reader (included on CD-ROM).