Economic Opportunity Mailing List Archive

["Andy Bullock" <<address removed>>]

The introductory comments make reference to possible constraints on agriculture 
imposed by water scarcity and rights of access. I limit my comments to Africa.

The evidence-base is that there is sufficient water available to meet the World 
Food Summit objective on halving malnutrition, while mantaining existing levels 
of water use by agriculture (for non-local food production - see below) without 
detriment to reasonable growth projections in other water demand sectors. 

There is also some considerable scope in many African countries to meet the WFS 
food objective and increase water use in agriculture to service other 
development objectives without detriment to other growing sectoral demands.

(I have drawn this distinction about current water use in agriculture because 
irrigated cereal in Africa contributes something like less than 8% of the 
required calorific intake requirements on the continent. Essentially, African 
irrigation is using significant amounts of water but the benefits of that water 
are not being realised in African food intake - it is serving other purposes). 

'De minimis' rights to water are granted by virtually every African national 
water law. No individual should (in principle) need any additional right to 
water for self-provisioning of food. 

The water constraint (in this context) is neither availablility (except in 
exceptional local circumstances) nor rights. Rather,  it is the small-scale 
'infrastructure' that brings the necessary control of water into crop 
production. There are a number of techniques for so-doing. Securing their 
uptake is the means to remove the most critical water constraint to household 
food production, enabling households to enter the virtuous cycle of poverty 
reduction. I propose that the constraints mentioned in the introductory remarks 
are not real constraints (but stand to be corrected). 

In certain national water laws, there is legislation governing the installation 
of small works, and a rationalisation of these (to avoid millions of farmers 
submitting individual 'works' applications) by Governments through regulations 
would represent an important and siginficant break-through.

I have deliberately restricted my comments here to water for food, rather than 
water for agriculture. It remains unproven whether there is sufficient water on 
the continent to meet food MDGs, economic growth at 7% (substantially through 
agriculture), energy targets and economic/social benefits from improved access 
to water for personal and domestic needs - or how this varies nationally. 
Issues of rights are also very different for access to water depending upon its 
use, and issues of rights and access are very significant to other forms of 
agriculture. 

This model does not apply to the 7-8 African countries where climate conditions 
dictate that food production has to be through large-scale irrgation 
infrastructure. 

Andy Bullock