diff --git a/python/doc/source/development.rst b/python/doc/source/development.rst
index af93d8d1a52..e4078bdaff7 100644
--- a/python/doc/source/development.rst
+++ b/python/doc/source/development.rst
@@ -246,6 +246,22 @@ To build a self-contained wheel (include Arrow C++ and Parquet C++), one can set
 Again, if you did not build parquet-cpp, you should omit ``--with-parquet`` and
 if you did not build with plasma, you should omit ``--with-plasma``.
 
+Known issues
+------------
+
+If using packages provided by conda-forge (see "Using Conda" above)
+together with a reasonably recent compiler, you may get "undefined symbol"
+errors when importing pyarrow.  In that case you'll need to force the C++
+ABI version to the older version used by conda-forge binaries:
+
+.. code-block:: shell
+
+   export CXXFLAGS="-D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0"
+   export PYARROW_CXXFLAGS=$CXXFLAGS
+
+Be sure to add ``-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=$CXXFLAGS`` to the cmake invocations
+when rebuilding.
+
 Developing on Windows
 =====================