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Andy Bullock's and John Dixon's comments re. water for food: 1) In relation to wetlands, we fully agree with Andy's remarks and recognise that Andy has done some very important work in raising awareness about the hydrological functioning of wetlands. 2) We don't agree that "the renewable groundwater recharge over large parts of the Basement Complex is significantly in excess of the capacity of existing technologies to exploit it". Clearly this is not the case in many parts of India - as evidenced by the huge increase in the number of borewells in recent years - and catchments approaching closure (as pointed out in the paper Inter-relating Resource Management Issues at the KAWAD Conference on Watershed Development and Sustainable Livelihoods, http://www.cluwrr.ncl.ac.uk/projects/india1/Ian_Calder.pdf the ANDHRA PRADESH RURAL LIVELIHOODS PROGRAMME WATER AUDIT http://www.nri.org/WSS-IWRM/reports_aprlpwra.htm, the paper: Watershed development: A solution to water shortages in semi-arid India or part of the problem? in : http://www.luwrr.com and in the Blue Revolution http://www.earthscan.co.uk/asp/bookdetails.asp?key=2013) 3) We would argue that the solution to the world's food requirements may require a combination of approaches. Increases in irrigated area may still be possible but it needs to be recognised that in many areas there is only limited availability of water for irrigation above the "reserve" requirement- using South African terminology. Alternatively there will need to be more efficient food production using rainfed agriculture(together with the supplementary irrigation that John Dixon refers to) or conversion of more of the rangelands or forests of the world to rainfed agriculture. We believe that SIWI and Malin Falkenmark's recognition that "It takes 550l of water to produce enough flour for one loaf of bread, a fraction of the 7 000l used to produce 100g of beef" illustrates well the the very poor water water to food conversion efficiency of rangeland devoted prmarily to the production of meat, as compared with dryland agriculture. 4) Andy suggests that rainwater harvesting captures water that "would generally evaporate or transpire before it reached river systems anyway under natural vegetation." However, it is becoming increasingly evident that intensive water harvesting along drainage lines in drier areas of India is changing the pattern of water use and availability and, in some cases, leading to negative impacts on downstream water users. Construction of large numbers of check dams and nala bunds creates additional storage in catchment areas that also leads to a relatively larger proportion of the run-off being retained in the upper catchment areas in low run-off years. Whilst we recognise that water harvesting can bring major benefits, we recommend that it is not considered to be a totally benign technology. 5) Water transfer payments or "greenwater trading" that is being proposed (DFID FRP CAMP policy brief: http://www.cluwrr.ncl.ac.uk/projects/camp/CAMP-RSA-SFRA.pdf) may be one way of encouraging more efficient and higher value use of greenwater(through transferring SFRA water use charges imposed on forestry which evaporates at a rate more than the indigenous baseline vegetation to dryland agriculture which is evaporating at a rate less than the baseline) and promoting rainfed agriculture. Ian Calder and Charles Batchelor Professor Ian R Calder, Director, Centre for Land Use and Water Resources Research University of Newcastle Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU Tel: 0191-222 6428 Fax: 0191-222 6563 http://www.cluwrr.ncl.ac.uk/ Managing Editor: Land Use and Water Resources Research http:///www.luwrr.com/ ============================================================= To send a reply to this message that goes to all list members, make sure that you send your reply to <address removed> To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to "<address removed>", with the message body: unsubscribe economic-opportunity <your-email-address>
Please visit dfid-agriculture-consultation.nri.org.