As an introduction use is made of the e-learning course, entitled "Remotely Sensed Information for Crop Monitoring and Food Security - Techniques and methods for arid and semi-arid areas", has been developed as part of the EU-FAO Programme on "Improved Global Governance for Hunger Reduction" and the technical contents have been provided by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The course used for this introduction is organized into 10 chapters, of approximately 30 to 100 minutes duration each, for a total of about 10 hours of self-paced learning and the various chapters are being used within the lessons for this course