Looking forward

6. The challenge ahead: re-inventing agricultural water management

The challenges ahead include the elimination of under-nutrition, coping with continued and changing demand for food and reaching a sustainable level of natural resource development and management. It is clear that given current rates of progress in addressing food insecurity, both irrigated and rainfed agriculture will need to be rethought in order to close current and projected gaps in food needs. At the same time management approaches will need to make room for transfers to other competing uses, including municipal water supply and environmental flows. It is in this sense that irrigated agriculture is under pressure to perform as a service to agriculture, not as an end in itself. This will involve shift in approach from a supply, or input- driven activity, to a much more demand responsive activity.

The contribution of rainfed agriculture is equally important and a strategic balance between irrigated and rainfed production often needs to be found. This will involve improving and intensifying rainfed farming systems through conservation agriculture, including soil moisture management as fertilizer application.

Six areas of progressive change are emerging:

1. Strategic development of the available land and water resources in order to service effective demand for food products and agriculture commodities.
2. A re-adjustment in the balance between formal irrigation water management and pro-poor and affordable agricultural water management (low cost and small scale options in water harvesting, irrigation and drainage are gaining wide acceptance amongst rural communities)
3. A broader economic awareness of the efficiency and productivity gains that can be made in developing and conserving water for agriculture and sustaining rural livelihoods.
4. A strategy of irrigation modernization, transforming existing rigid command and control systems into much more flexible service delivery systems.
5. Structured and regulated participation of water users - individual farmers and farmer groups, and other interest groups - is proving important at local level in improving food security when it is negotiated on the basis of clear distribution of obligations and liabilities.
6. A realization that agriculture can shoulder its environmental responsibilities much more effectively by minimizing the negative environmental impacts of irrigated agriculture and looking for opportunities to restore the productivity of natural ecosystems.

In this sense there are positive opportunities for improved agricultural water use. In promoting better water use, the behaviour of the individual farmer is key, but water is only one of many farm inputs and its local economic and environmental significance needs to be put into perspective. Government agencies in developed and developing countries will need to develop into that of sophisticated economic and environmental regulators to overcome problems of food production and natural resource depletion. Therefore the continued use of water for agriculture has to be predicated on extracting the value from existing infrastructure and producing into effective markets. Agriculture and water policy have their respective roles to play here and but they need to be much more effectively 'joined up'.

However, certain institutional constraints can be expected to persist. The incentives to manage demand for irrigation services will remain weak (some subsidies to water and energy for pumping can be expected to remain in place) and water is only one of many micro-economic decisions that farmers have to take. The sheer scale of the asset base and the intensity of vested interests may well reinforce institutional rigidities for some time to come. Equally, the distorting effects of price support and input subsidies will continue to dampen private initiatives that might otherwise flourish.

With these considerations in mind, it is possible to identify three keys for unlocking the water potential in agriculture, modernization, governance and investment.