Sustainability in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus

Anik Bhaduri, Claudia Ringler, Ines Dombrowsky, Rabi Mohtar, Waltina Scheumann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315408804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is beyond doubt that the interconnectedness between food, energy, water security and environmental sustainability exists and is getting amplified with increased globalization. It has been recognized that efforts to address only one part of a systemic problem by neglecting other inherently interlinked aspects may not lead to desirable and sustainable outcomes. In this perspective, policy- and decision- making requires a nexus approach that reduces trade-offs and builds synergies across sectors, and helps to reduce costs and increase benefits for humans and nature compared to independent approaches to the management of water, energy, food and the environment. In the past, work related to the Nexus has looked at the interactions between water and food or water and energy, but there has been a reluctance to bring forward a broader systematic perspective that captures the multiple sectors and resource dependencies while understanding its cost to the environment if we neglect these linkages. This book is a compilation of thirteen papers published previously as a special issue of Water International, contains significant pieces of work on the W-E-F nexus focusing on relevant tools, solutions and governance at local and broader human scales.

The impact of water users’ associations on the productivity of irrigated agriculture in Pakistani Punjab

Dawit K. Mekonnen^a, Hira Channa^b and Claudia Ringler^a

^aInternational Food Policy Research Institute, Environment and Production Technology Division, Washington, DC, USA; ^bPakistan Strategy Support Program, Islamabad, Pakistan

This paper finds productivity-enhancing effects of watercourse-level water users’ associations for farms at the tail of a watercourse and for those that rely exclusively on groundwater – two groups that are marginalized from surface water use and more likely to rely increasingly on groundwater. Yet, heavy reliance on groundwater consumes vast energy resources and leads to environmental degradation through overdraft and groundwater salinization. Improving the management of surface water through functioning watercourse-level institutions can increase use efficiency across water, energy and land resources through increasing agricultural productivity of those now least able to access fresh surface water resources.

Introduction

Irrigated agriculture in Pakistan is challenged by water scarcity, salinity, waterlogging and high conveyance losses at the watercourse level. Of the 139 million acre-feet (171 km³) of annual water flow available to Pakistan in the rivers of the Indus Basin, the country diverts 75% to its canal irrigation system. However, 25% of this surface water, amounting to 26 million acre-feet (32 km³), is lost due to conveyance losses in the canal system (Bandaragoda & Ur Rehman, 1995). Furthermore, of the 78 million acre-feet (96 km³) that reaches the head of watercourses, 45% is lost due to conveyance losses in tertiary watercourses. Despite the replenishment of groundwater through conveyance seepage, groundwater is increasingly overexploited, as the surface system can meet only 30% of total irrigation demand with insufficient surface supplies to both tail-end distributaries and fields at the tail end of watercourses (Anwar & Ul Haq, 2013). Groundwater pumping is also highly resource-intensive, requiring significant initial investment in tubewells and pumps, and continuous outlays for diesel fuel. Groundwater pumping represents more than half of the total direct energy use in Punjab’s agricultural sector (Siddiqi & Wescoat, 2013).

Poor cost recovery for irrigation and drainage, and under-investment in operation and maintenance, contribute to current irrigation system inefficiencies in Pakistan (Dinar, Balakrishnan, & Wambia, 2004). Other underlying factors include public-sector inefficiencies, the structure of the agrarian society and its land-tenure system, irrigation system design, and the political economy resulting from the interplay of all these factors (Dinar et al., 2004).

To address growing challenges in Pakistan’s irrigation system, the government of Pakistan, with support chiefly from the World Bank, started to devolve responsibilities held by provincial irrigation departments to local user groups under the 1997 Provincial Irrigation Authority Act (Bell, Aberman, Zaidi, & Wielgosz, 2013; Khan, 2009). Though implemented somewhat differently across provinces and canal circles, this irrigation management transfer (IMT) process generally had three elements. Provincial irrigation departments would become financially autonomous authorities, with responsibility from barrages to canal headworks. Area water boards would be established around all canal commands to take over and manage the irrigation and drainage system from canal headwork to distributaries and minors; and farmer organizations (FOs) would take over the operation and maintenance of minors, distributaries and lower-level drainage infrastructure (Dinar et al., 2004; Ul Hassan, Hamid, & Khan, 2003). Additionally, water users’ associations (WUAs) at the watercourse level could each nominate one member to the general assembly of FOs at the minor/distributary level, but otherwise were not part of the formal IMT process and continued to operate under the provincial ordinances of the early 1980s that govern them.

The IMT process in Pakistan faced challenges primarily from two groups that benefitted from the status quo: irrigation department officials who were extracting rents from farmers by making water artificially scarce and its supply unpredictable; and some influential landowners who were using their economic power to gain additional surface water access (Dinar et al., 2004; Ul Hassan, 2013). These groups mischaracterized the reforms as privatization of the irrigation and drainage system, designed and imposed by the IMF and the World Bank as a condition of providing financial support to Pakistan (Dinar et al., 2004). Small farmers and tenants feared that water rates would go up and feared undue influence on the new institutions from influential farmers (Ul Hassan, 2013). As a result, IMT implementation was only half-hearted (Bell et al., 2013). In Punjab, the first handover of irrigation management to a minor/distributary-level FO took place only in 2005 (Ul Hassan, 2013). The provincial irrigation and drainage authority reduced the operation and maintenance responsibilities of FOs to only “reporting offenders” (Ul Hassan, 2011); and only a limited number of area water boards were put in place (Ul Hassan, 2009).

Despite the challenges that the IMT process has faced in Pakistan, a number of case studies report that farmer-managed distributaries and minors are performing better than in the pre-reform period. In the command area of the Lower Chenab Canal East, Baig, Ashfaq, Hassan, Mushtaq, and Raza (2009) and Raza, Ashfaq, and Baig (2009) reported that both crop yields and recovery of irrigation charges improved with an overall improvement in operation and maintenance of the system after the transfer of the management to FOs. Zaman, Sultan, Asghar, and Kamran (1998) reported that WUAs in the Hakra 4-R distributary were successful in mobilizing labour and monetary resources for maintenance as well as for conflict resolution among farmers. Evidence in the literature from other parts of the world suggests that WUAs have led to yield improvements (Liu, Meinzen-Dick, Qian, Zhang, & Jiang, 2002; Samad & Vermillion, 1999), more efficient utilization of water and increased production in a dry year (Uphoff & Wijayaratna, 2000), and conflict resolution (Waheed, 1998). There is also evidence that these benefits are space- and context-specific as the success of WUAs depends on factors such as democratic election of WUA leaders (Liu et al., 2002), existing social networks such as biradari (caste) ties (Waheed, 1998), whether the watercourses are improved or traditional (Alam, Kobayashi, Matsumura, & Esham, 2012), the presence of sub-groups within the WUA (Zhang, Heerink, Dries, & Shi, 2013), and how active the farmer organization is (Gedara, Wilson, Pascoe, & Robinson, 2012).

This article takes these previous Pakistani analyses one step further by examining the role of watercourse-level institutions (WUAs) on improving resource-use efficiency and enhancing agricultural productivity province-wide.

The regulatory environment and formation of WUAs in Pakistan

The initial pieces of legislation governing the irrigation network in the Indus Basin were passed during the British colonial era. According to the Canal and Drainage Act (1873) governing the irrigation network in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Provinces, and the Sindh Irrigation Act (1879), construction of and major repairs to watercourses were the responsibility of the provincial authorities, while overall maintenance of the watercourses was unregulated by these acts and thus the responsibilit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Introduction: Sustainability in the water–energy–food nexus
• 1. The impact of water users’ associations on the productivity of irrigated agriculture in Pakistani Punjab
• 2. Water–energy–food (WEF) Nexus Tool 2.0: guiding integrative resource planning and decision-making
• 3. Bioenergy, food security and poverty reduction: trade-offs and synergies along the water–energy–food security nexus
• 4. Application of a water–energy–food nexus framework for the Duero river basin in Spain
• 5. Reuse of oil and gas produced water in south-eastern New Mexico: resource assessment, treatment processes, and policy
• 6. Water–energy–food nexus in a transboundary context: the Euphrates–Tigris river basin as a case study
• 7. Water–food–energy nexus in Chile: the challenges due to global change in different regional contexts
• 8. How would the Rogun Dam affect water and energy scarcity in Central Asia?
• 9. Governance of transitions towards sustainable development – the water–energy–food nexus in Cyprus
• 10. The water–energy–food (WEF) security nexus: the policy perspective of Bangladesh
• 11. Where is the power? Transnational networks, authority and the dispute over the Xayaburi Dam on the Lower Mekong Mainstream
• 12. Application of payments for hydrological ecosystem services to solve problems of fit and interplay in integrated water resources management
• Index