Conference Papers

Irrigated agriculture and, consequently, water have always played an important role in the economic development of Iran and is likely to continue as such in the future. Since agriculture is the major user of water, therefore sustainability of agriculture depends on the timely and adequate availability of water. The increasing pressures of population and industrialization have already placed greater demands on water, with an everincreasing number and intensity of local and regional conflicts over its availability and use. Iran will face severe water shortages in the 21st century. The gap between demand and supply of water is increasing. The extended drought during recent years exacerbated the problem. Therefore, the need for further development of new resources, adoption of water-conservation measures and judicious use of water is being stressed at all forums. This paper will provide a comprehensive review of the present water resources of Iran, challenges faced by the irrigated agriculture and strategies to overcome these problems to ensure sustainability of irrigated agriculture. This paper will also suggest possible research areas for future cooperation between IWMI and Iran in the field of land and water management. It is envisaged that discussions at the workshop will help in refining these ideas and develop partnerships and linkages among various national research institutions and IWMI to develop a comprehensive program for the years to come.

Rapidly increasing trends of poverty, particularly in South Asia, have emerged as a major threat to the economic development of this region. Currently, over 500 million South Asians live in absolute poverty, while over 300 million are chronically malnourished. In Pakistan, vulnerable population of 45 million makes 25 percent of those living in poverty due to economic downturn. Although food production in the region has gained momentum during the past decade (per capita dietary energy supply in South Asia has increased), the incidence of poverty and absolute number of undernourished people in South Asia has gone up. This means that crisis of food insecurity in the region is mostly related to low access rather than low availability. The major reasons for this low access are poor targeting policies of the government and inefficient public distribution system. Therefore, to ensure food security, the government should improve accessibility and distribution of food to poor, particularly those in far-flung areas. Three quarters of the world’s total irrigated area is in developing countries where smallholder agriculture still predominates. No wonder, then, that increased agricultural production is considered a key to poverty reduction in many developing countries. Irrigated agriculture is regarded to be vehicle for the provision of basic needs and reduction in vulnerability to food insecurity. Irrigation development can bring a range of potential benefits at regional and national level. Therefore, by advances in irrigation management, better understanding of the environment in which poor people live, right choices of irrigation technologies, better defining production functions and creating profitable markets can make a significant contribution to crop production and poverty reduction. This paper discusses illusions in different poverty estimates and introduces a framework to increase regional food security. The paper is also aimed at finding the ways to reduce poverty through improving irrigated agriculture.

Agricultural income occupies significant share of rural households’ income. Only ample and reliable supplies of surface irrigation water can guarantee its improvement. As poverty is inversely correlated with improvement in incomes, provided other factors remain the same, the policy makers can use irrigation as a tool in poverty reduction programs. The inequity in surface water distribution not only affects the rural households across different irrigations but also influences the distribution of income and poverty situation in different reaches of each irrigation system. Since long, it is asserted that households in the tail reach areas have relatively poor access to irrigation water as compared to those situated in the head and middle reach areas. It is evident that more distance from irrigation source brings more households in the poverty trap are located at the tail reach area. Here, the intensity of poverty would be higher than in the head and middle reach areas. This paper tests this hypothesis with results showing that poverty increases in the tail reach areas as compared to head and middle reach areas. This calls for the need to address current hurdles exercising equity and reliability in irrigation supplies in order to provide this vital input for increasing agricultural productivity of the tail end farm households.

The phenomenon of poverty is receiving the increasing attention of policy makers and institutions with an attempt to improve the living standards of the third world countries. Pakistan is no exemption to that. As the majority of third world population is concentrated in rural areas and dependent on agriculture sector for income, it becomes of special interest to dig into the root causes of poverty in these areas. A number of studies have shown that poverty is concentrated in the rural areas of Pakistan. However, a wide variation in estimates of poverty was experienced owing to various approaches and different poverty lines used by the researchers in estimating the incidence, depth, and severity of poverty. Recently, the Government of Pakistan addressed this issue by circulating the official poverty line. Poverty being a complex phenomenon, its determinants vary from time to time and across different areas. However, most of the studies indicate that poverty in Pakistan is concentrated in rural areas of Pakistan. Applying dollar a day poverty line shows that the poverty in Pakistan is higher as compared with many other Asian countries.

More than 12 million people added to the poor in Pakistan between 1993 and 1999. The rising poverty was the result of poor governance and slow economic growth (Asian Development Bank 2002). All available evidence on poverty trends in Pakistan suggests that the problem of poverty in the country worsened during the 1990s, and this was more so in rural areas than in urban areas. Rural economy of the country is caught up in a vicious circle of problems – rapidly increasing population resulting in decreasing per capita resource base, low literacy level, continued high level of inequity in resource distribution, slow growth in both farm and non-farm sectors, and more importantly, continued poor governance. All these factors adversely affected the efforts to reduce poverty. Agricultural economy, which forms the backbone of broader rural economy of the country, is presently facing three major inter-related problems: (1) increasing water scarcity coupled with continued poor performance of irrigation systems, (2) increasing degradation of land and water resources, and (3) farmers’ poor access to other key production inputs and services – all resulting in actual agricultural productivity levels continuing to be much below the achievable potential levels. Enhancing agricultural productivity through removing these constraints, especially for small farms, is one of the keys to address the problem of food and income poverty. This paper provides an overview of poverty trends in Pakistan. It highlights fundamental issues related to rural poverty and offers key approaches to enhancing agricultural productivity for food security and poverty alleviation in rural Pakistan.

In the classical model of irrigation efficiency, all water applied to the crop is treated as consumed or lost while the integrated basin view of irrigation efficiency views only the effective evapo-transpiration as the consumptive use in irrigation. In either case, increased water efficiency at farm/individual level would not lead to water saving at the system (basin) level unless these higher farm efficiencies are achieved system-wide! Thus, unless the adoption of micro-irrigation is scaled up, it would not make any significant contribution to alleviating the problem of groundwater depletion and in resolving various related issues. Even after more than three decades of promotion by various government and non-government agencies, the spread of micro-irrigation in India is miniscule. The limited growth of micro-irrigation technologies in India can, to a large extent, be explained by the apparent gap between what ha s been marketed and where the demand lies. This paper tries to understand the adoption, spread, impacts, market dynamics and constraints of micro-irrigation technologies through an extensive review of literature and by capturing recent development in the field to derive conclusions and implications for promotion of these technologies, especially among the poor.

This paper presents an overview and synthesis of the key research and capacity building issues arising from the workshop presentations and the papers. Three days of intensive deliberations by professionals from various research, development and governmental organizations, and of diverse disciplines, backgrounds and nationalities have clearly acknowledged that water management issues remain very crucial for poverty alleviation and rural development in Ethiopia – the overwhelming proportion of the population depends on smallholder agricultural production, which is highly constrained by water availability (absence of perennial rivers, high spatial and temporal availability of rainfall, etc.). This situation, over the years, has generated a critical need for efficient water and land management to reduce production risks and hazards, and enhance stable agricultural and livestock production. Recent decades have witnessed various efforts in the area of irrigation and supplementary irrigation (and other development initiatives), employing various water harvesting technologies, construction of micro dams, diversions structures, etc., which were largely combined with traditional yield-enhancing methods to facilitate sustainable smallholder agricultural production.; Most of these efforts did not only fall short of their desired objectives of improving smallholder production conditions but also generated a host of other problems which aggravated smallholder production conditions: the large scale irrigation schemes (e.g. Awash Basin and elsewhere) resulted in secondary soil salinization where large tracts of land have gone out of production; the spontaneous construction of micro-dams across the country (especially in Tigray) is associated with human and livestock health hazards that in some cases has resulted into abandonment of the dams; the production potential of extensive watersheds remain largely unexploited or inappropriately utilized, resulting in extensive degradation of fragile lands, and so on. The potential for effectively integrating crops and livestock management in the context of growing water in complementary crop-livestock systems remains largely unexploited, especially from the perspective of efficient water and land utilization. The limited success of most of the technologies in Ethiopia calls attention to a dire need for research and capacity building to understand the complex issues of water and land management, so as to enhance national and local capacity to deal with water and land management issues to enhance food security, poverty alleviation and national economic development.

Its focus is on small-scale agricultural water use technologies (irrigation in its widest sense) in sub-Saharan Africa. Section 1 provides an overview of the current status of natural resources, rural development and poverty, irrigation investment trends, and emerging new irrigation technology options. Section 2 discusses IPTRID’s contribution to these emerging options. Section 3 proposes some ideas for consideration in terms of the future directions of IPTRID’s work on small-scale irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa.

This research assesses the widespread transfer of government-run smallholder irrigation schemes in Africa to the management of organized groups of farmers in the light of decades of experience by various countries . The comparative study of the Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) suggests that it can work if certain preconditions are met. This research finds that IMT is unlikely to work for African smallholders. Here, the institutional alternatives most likely to succeed are those that address the whole complex set of constraints that African smallholders face.