John Van D. Lewis (PhD, Anthropology, Yale University 1979) is a retired US Foreign Service Officer, having served as a Supervisory Rural & Agricultural Development Director at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for twenty years (1980-2000). Prior to that (1978-1981) he was an Assistant Professor of African Studies at Howard University. Most of the previous four years (1974-1978) were spent in Mali (a.) doing USAID-funded dissertation field research in socio-economic anthropology in a sizable, Bambara-speaking subsistence farming village 50 km southeast of Segu and 100 km northwest of Djenne; and (b.) participating, as a social anthropologist employee of the International Livestock Center for Africa (ILCA), in an inter-disciplinary study of the seasonal cattle transhumance of the FulBe community of DiafaraBe, 30 km west of Djenne, between the interior delta of the Niger in the dry season to the Nema of southeastern Mauritania in the rainy season, and back again. Except for four years (1983-1987) on USAID longterm assignment to Haiti, Dr. Lewis has made a work related visit to francophone West Africa at least once a year between 1974 and the present. Dr. Lewis currently serves as Managing Director of Natural Resource Management at Terra Global.