'More crop per drop'.

AuthorShah, Tushaar
PositionPopulationWatch

Intensification of water scarcity is an unpleasant reality in many emerging economies of the world. However, the causes of water scarcity sometimes differ. Research at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) suggests that tackling water scarcity implies quite different challenges in Africa where it is predominantly "economic" and in Asia where it is "physical". In Africa, it is a question of promoting judicious creation of new hydraulic capital, but in Asia water scarcity is about an unsustainably large number of rural poor living off a limited base of natural resources, particularly fresh water. In the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan echoed a decade of IWMI research when he said that "we need a 'Blue Revolution' in agriculture that focuses on increasing productivity per unit of water--'more crop per drop'."

New IWMI research suggests we also need more "cash per drop" and "more jobs per drop".

Over decades of economic progress, the industrialized world has evolved approaches that are now helping them manage their freshwater well. These approaches have held a powerful sway over global water thinking in recent years and yielded stylized approaches, whose common refrain is integrated management of water and land resources in a river basin framework. Policy prescriptions implied are transform fragmented territorial water institutions into integrated river basin organizations; price water to reflect its scarcity; institute tradable property rights; and establish appropriate legal and regulatory mechanisms for effective demand management.

Adopting these policies, however, creates new difficulties and tensions because they fail to factor in three aspects of the fresh water challenge facing water-scarce countries: what drives their irrigation economies; how best to influence their water users; and how will their fresh water situation respond to their overall economic evolution. Irrigation is at the heart of the water scarcity in water stressed regions. But for irrigation, India's freshwater challenge would be much easier to meet. And the first world has never dealt with irrigation on the scale we find in water-stressed countries. Seventy per cent of the world's irrigated areas are in Asia, and much future irrigation development will occur in Africa. These countries need irrigation because of three reasons--extreme climate, high population pressure, and low levels of economic development, occurring...

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