Review of agricultural water use per country

Previous data collection processes through AQUASTAT have shown that figures for agricultural water use and water use productivity are not always available at country level. If such data exist, they are in most cases not very reliable. This is mainly due to the complexity of the assessment methods and to the absence of direct measurement of water withdrawal for agriculture. As they are among the most crucial indicators in assessing progress in agricultural water use, a review of countries' agricultural water use is necessary to improve the overall quality of global water resources monitoring. The main objective of this review is to provide policy and decision makers as well as the international scientific community with a dataset containing reliable data, calculated in a uniform way, and comparable with each other. The spatial coverage of the data consists of 90 developing countries and countries in transition. In this study, a water balance approach was used to estimate current and future water use in agriculture for 90 developing countries, based on the global map of irrigation and available climatic datasets. The review is described in the following sections:

	Methodology
	Water balance under natural conditions
	Crop water requirements
	Irrigation water withdrawal
	Conclusions
	References

The main outputs of this study consist of an irrigation cropping calendar per country and a table with the irrigation water use per country for the year 2000:

	Irrigation cropping calendar per country
	Irrigation water use per country