UN Chronicle | PopulationWatch - 'More Crop per Drop'

PopulationWatch
'More Crop per Drop'
By Tushaar Shah

Article

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 all at once.

South Asian and North China plains would find it easier to preserve their freshwater if they had lower population density as in Australia or Israel, better water endowments as in Canada, a more favourable rainfall pattern and climate as in Europe, a well-developed industrial and service economy as in the Asian tigers, or a strategic resource like oil as in Iraq, Iran or Saudi Arabia. Since they have none of these, their only hope is in squeezing more crops, cash and livelihoods from every drop of water, until they can substantially ease population pressure on agriculture. Growing food for their large populations is formidable enough a challenge for South Asia and China; but even more formidable is the challenge of providing secure livelihoods for large segments of rural population dependent on farming.

In the industrialized world today, notions of how water should be managed are conditioned by the way the water sector is organized. After centuries of economic growth, populations have concentrated in urban agglomerations near the estuaries. Municipal and industrial uses of water have rapidly increased, while agricultural use of "managed" water has shrunk. Most water users are served by service-providing agencies that are amenable to regulation and economic management.

Water has become an "industry"; and like in any industry, pricing has become an effective tool for water demand management, as well as for funds generation for maintaining and improving hydraulic infrastructure. The key freshwater management challenge is allocating water between alternative uses, and the stage is set for river basin management.

Developing countries in Asia and Africa are decades away from evolving their water sectors to this stage of maturity. Here, the water sector is largely informal; the majority of users get their water requirements directly from nature, from small decentralized storages or from groundwater, untrammeled by laws and regulatory frameworks and unmediated by service providers. Management of water demand is critical but nearly impossible, because of the challenge of regulating a vast number of tiny users.

Just take the case of groundwater regulation. South Asia and North China's virtually unmanaged groundwater aquifers are being depleted by a colossal, informal groundwater economy whose growth has responded more to population density than to the availability of the resource (Debroy and Shah). This is as much a challenge in the western United States and Mexico. Yet, the problem is far more complex in Asia. The United States uses 100 km3 of groundwater every year, but the bulk of this is pumped by around 200,000 large pumps and benefits 2 per cent of the American people. In contrast, India's 150 km3 of annual groundwater use is extracted by 20 million small pump owners and supports over half of India's population. And yet, the United States and Mexico have not been particularly more effective in regulating groundwater depletion and degradation than India and China [see table on right side] (Shah 2003a).

Photo/Horst Rutsch

Ironically, economic growth may well be the best healer for the ailing freshwater ecologies of the water-stressed world. As long as smallholder agriculture in Asia and Africa continues to act as the parking lot for the rural poor, their Governments will find it difficult to resist irrigation development. As economic progress generates off-farm livelihood opportunities, freshwater use in agriculture declines or becomes easier to regulate. During three decades of rapid growth in some parts of east Asia, for example, irrigated areas fell by 40 per cent; and a similar trend is emerging in Mexico.

The IWMI analysis, with the help of the new Water Poverty Index developed by scientists at Keel and Wallingford, suggests that the access to water depends not so much on physical water resources of a country but on its GNP/capita.

It shows that the quality of freshwater too seems to follow the inverted Kuznets' curve: declining in early stages of economic growth but rising as countries improve their standard of living, regardless of physical endowments of water resources (Shah 2003b). The challenge before the water-stressed world is to chalk out what Peter Gleick has called the "soft water path" to economic growth, which is more mindful of the value of preserving freshwater in the strategic choices it makes for growing its economy.

NGO efforts to popularize low-cost micro-irrigation technologies in South Asia, people's movement to use rain-water harvesting and recharge aquifers in western India and up-land areas of China, the enthusiasm in southern India, the United Republic of Tanzania and Ghana to reinvent the social uses of age-old tanks and ponds in local water supply and irrigation systems—all these exemplify unique responses of water-stressed regions to their unique freshwater challenges.

These deserve more and empathetic international attention and support than they get now. In part, this is because of the dominant belief that today's developing world will solve its freshwater problems in much the same way as the first world did decades ago.

It is doubtful if this will be the case entirely. The world needs to help water-stressed developing countries devise freshwater management strategies appropriate to their socio-ecological context and the genius of their people.

The most important role the United Nations can play is that of creating a larger common ground between the water wisdom developed in the industrialized world and a textured understanding of the freshwater challenges facing the water stressed regions and of unique innovations being tried out in parts of Asia and Africa.

References

Shah, Tushaar, Ian Makin, R. Sakthivadivel and M. Samad (2002) "Limits to Leapfrogging: Issues in Transposing Successful River Basin Management Institutions in the Developing World". Charles L. Abernethy, Ed. Intersectoral Management of River Basins. Colombo: International Water Management Institute.
Debroy, Aditi and Tushaar Shah (2003) "Groundwater Socio-ecology of South Asia". Custodio, E. and R. Llamas, Eds. Intensive Use of Groundwater: Challenges and Opportunities. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeillinger.
Shah, Tushaar (2003a) "Governing the Groundwater Economy: Comparative Analysis of National Institutions and Policies In South Asia, China and Mexico". Paper presented at SINEX Conference, Valencia, Spain, 7-10 December 2002.
Shah, Tushaar (2003b) "Water Poverty of Nations: Its Causes and Remedies". Internal paper. Anand: International Water Management Institute.

Biography

Tushaar Shah, winner of the 2002 Outstanding Scientist of the Year award of the CGIAR, is a principal scientist with the International Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka, a Future Harvest centre engaged in research on ways to improve productivity of water for food, livelihoods and nature.

Go Back Top